I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love and adore Michelle Obama. She is smart, accomplished, funny, kind, caring, and stunningly beautiful, but her beauty is the least interesting thing about her.
Michelle’s husband summed it up in a video last week: "I have a super hot wife. She taught me that a lot of times, I think I’m right, but I’m wrong. So she continually corrects me, which I think has made me much more humble, and striving to improve myself at all times."
There is no doubt at all that Michelle made her husband a better man and a better president. When I watch them now, or read about them, I have a desperate sense of longing for them, and for her.
That’s why what happened Sunday night, on a stage built on the White House South Lawn for a $60 million UFC fight, timed to Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, pissed me off and enraged me.
My mother always said empty barrels make the most noise, and she was never more right than when the cavernous empty barrel, heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit, during a live interview with Joe Rogan, thanked God and Trump (God is no doubt pissed too!) and then, with nothing prompting it, looked into the camera and said: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
The crowd’s reaction was mixed: some boos, some shocked silence, and some laughter. Rogan said nothing except “Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit.”
And of course, Donald Trump was seen half-smiling. UFC CEO Dana White, to his credit, called the remark “nasty and false” and said he hates “that kind of nonsense".
The White House would not directly address it. But another supremely empty barrel, former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, told TMZ he found it “hilarious.” Conversely, and rightly, Jon Stewart said Hokit was a “F—ing A–hole.”
That’s putting it mildly.
And so a lie that has circulated in right-wing corners of the internet for years, the gendered, transphobia-fueled insult that’s also been hurled at WNBA star Brittney Griner, got center stage and the implicit blessing of Trump's putrid smirk.
As we all know, this wasn’t a one-off. Trump used it himself in February, when he posted a video to Truth Social that superimposed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces onto cartoon apes set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The White House initially defended it as a joke before deleting it, after even yet another empty barrel, Senator Tim Scott, called it the most racist thing he’d seen from this administration. Trump never apologized.
Yes, I know Michelle Obama has preached that when they go low, we go high, but with all due respect, I’m not going to do that here. She may refrain from going low, but I am not.
Comparatively speaking, Michelle Obama is the antithesis of everything that Donald Trump is. She’s sensationally gorgeous. He looks like a rotted, worm-infested gourd. She’s super smart. Trump is a banal, brainless blobfish. She exudes grace and compassion. Trump exudes ignominy and opprobrium.
I could do this all day, but you get the point.
The insults aimed at Michelle Obama are loaded with contempt. They’re about her gender, her race, her body, her femininity. They are the oldest tools known to racist white men for putting a powerful Black woman in her place.
What makes Michelle Obama such a recurring object of right-wing rage isn’t a mystery. She’s everything the Trump administration resents.
She’s the most consistently admired woman in America. Gallup has named her the country’s most admired woman in poll after poll since 2018, a run that Melania Trump has never come close to touching.
And if you think I was harsh about comparing Melania’s husband to Michelle Obama, don’t even get me started comparing Melania to Michelle. But I will say one thing: Michelle has never charged an LGBTQ+ organization for speaking out on their behalf. Melania, on the other hand, famously charged Log Cabin Republicans (empty barrels galore!) $250,000 to show up for a fundraiser.
Michelle’s high-quality composure is also what lets her sit, year after year, beside George W. Bush at state funerals. It’s a friendship built on shared grief and a shared sense of humor that produced viral hugs and a slipped Altoid at John McCain’s funeral.
She’s said plainly that she and Bush “disagree on policy” but “don’t disagree on humanity.” It’s the kind of bipartisan grace that’s nearly extinct in 2026 and is the complete opposite of Donald and Melania’s coldness and shrillness.
Michelle is, charmingly, just a Chicago kid who grew up watching Cubs games with her dad, a “mixed marriage,” as she’s joked, since her husband bleeds White Sox. It’s a small, human detail.
Contrast this with Donald and Melania foaming at the mouth at a blood-sport event on Sunday night.
It’s worth remembering, in June and Pride Month, that the Obama White House lit itself up in rainbow colors the night marriage equality became law in 2015, and that Michelle Obama and her daughter Malia snuck outside to watch the celebration from the lawn, a moment she later described in her wonderful memoir, Becoming.
The Obama administration also hosted LGBTQ+ Pride Month receptions at the White House for six straight years. It’s worth pointing out - again - that the Trump White House holds no Pride events, and only hosts a UFC fighter using the octagon as a bullhorn to bully Michelle.
This “joke” by Hokit is far from a one-off, and it sends a signal far beyond that octagon. It tells every troll, every “manosphere” podcaster, every person who has spent a decade insisting a Black First Lady is “really” a man that they were right to keep saying it, and that there’s no cost to repeating it.
Michelle Obama has written about hearing this specific insult for years and choosing, mostly, to laugh it off rather than dignify it with a response. That restraint is beyond admirable. It shouldn’t be necessary, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for the lie being harmless.
This Thursday, the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public in Chicago, fittingly opening near the anniversary of Juneteenth. The Center will tell the story of the first Black president and the woman beside him.
Their legacy is what we should be paying attention to this week, and celebrating. Eight years of a presidency, a marriage, and a partnership that made you so proud to be an American.
Michelle Obama is an exemplary human being who just so happens to be dazzling inside and out. She doesn’t need to respond to “F—ing A–hole” empty barrels screeching discrimination and hate.
We - and I - can do that for her.
