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Michelle Obama is Right to Skip the Inauguration.

Elizabeth Spiers
5 min readJan 17, 2025

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Photo by Dori Drabek on Unsplash

Yesterday on Fox News, Kid Rock**chastised Michelle Obama for opting out of the second inauguration of Donald Trump. For context: Kid Rock’s real name is Bob, he’s the son of an insanely wealthy car dealer in Michigan, is only slightly worse than Don Jr. at blue collar cosplay, and if he were not a vocal Trump supporter, everyone would have forgotten who he was a long time ago. His is ostensibly a musician, but that’s less stretching the definition of “musician” than waterboarding it.

In his Fox News appearance (seemingly his only job these days), he said she “seemed angry”, because even his bigotry is unoriginal. He also self righteously reminded the former First Lady that he played at the Youth Inaugural Ball in 2009 “out of respect for the president.”

Whatever, Bob.

Ms. Obama is not skipping the inauguration because she has a conflict but because frankly, she doesn’t need to attend and doesn’t want to. Kind of like how Melania Trump didn’t need or want to attend her husband’s criminal trial, and probably for similar reasons: they both loathe him.

In response the MAGA right has pretended to clutch their pearls about norms and respect for the office, after having voting for a guy who has destroyed any semblance of the former, and as such, degraded the latter. Predictably, many of…

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Elizabeth Spiers
Elizabeth Spiers

Written by Elizabeth Spiers

Writer, NYU j-school prof, political commentator, digital strategist, ex-editor in chief of The New York Observer, founding editor of Gawker

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