Kevin Dietsch / Getty
January 20, 2025, 8 AM ET
No constitutional scholar or judge has ever questioned the American right to skip a spouse’s annoying work thing. Has anyone ever had a good time at one of these horrible events? You’re clutching your little plastic cup of wine (Sheila knows so much about wine!) while you get shuffled along like an oddity—Look, it’s Mike’s wife! Nobody wants to talk with you, and you don’t want to talk with them. They want to drink wine and talk about work, and you want to drink wine and watch Severance.
Sometimes it’s a minefield because you have to pretend you don’t already know a whole lot about these people. You’d happily eviscerate a few of them if you could be your authentic self. But you have to be like a Rose Bowl float, wheeled around in mild weather and emanating impersonal goodwill. Don’t ever make me do that again, you say in the car on the way home.
So when Michelle Obama announced that she would be skipping Donald Trump’s inauguration today, I thought, Good move. I bet Barack’s not crazy about going either, but he’s on the place mats and gets a pension, so he probably has to play ball. The corner of the internet occupied by insufficiently-hinged Michelle Obama haters thought they had some red meat. The norms! The traditions! The continuity of government! But they were robbed of a win when reminded that neither Donald nor Melania Trump attended the last inauguration.
There had to be some way for the brain trust to work this to its advantage. But how? And just like that a theory, a possibility—no, a probability—arose: Because Michelle hadn’t attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral either, she must be trying to avoid … her own husband. What are the chances of those two running into each other anywhere else? The pieces fell quickly into place. Carter’s corpse was at the funeral but won’t be at the inauguration, so that can’t be what she’s trying to avoid. George W. Bush was at the funeral and will be at the inauguration, but Michelle and W. kind of like each other. Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi will surely be at the inauguration, but they weren’t at the funeral—are you seeing a pattern? The Daily Mail even hinted that someone had come between husband and wife: Jennifer Aniston.
I suspect that the Obamas’ marriage is fine, and Michelle Obama can’t stand Donald Trump and doesn’t want to be anywhere near him. She went to his first inauguration because she had to, but if your spouse has been at a different company for the past eight years, you’re certainly not required to show up at the old home week of the damned. To disrespect her right to stay home is to disrespect your own right not to spend your Saturday playing mini golf with your own Pete Hegseth when you could go to Costco or sleep in a tangle of warm blankets. Let it enter the work-life lexicon: The next time you get approached with one of these grisly invitations, tell your mate that you’re going to have to pull a Michelle Obama, and then put your feet up, enjoy your normal blood pressure, and fill three hours of your life any way you see fit.
