Former President Barack Obama
appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday to talk about his new memoir, A Promised Land, but stole the show with his quips about the 2020 election, Trump’s tenure in office and hilarious family dynamics.
“Why did you leave us with him,” Kimmel opened.
“I had to follow the Constitution and Michelle’s mandate,” Obama joked.
Obama's recent memoir sold 890,000 copies within 24 hours of its release in the U.S. and Canada according to 6ABC.
Kimmel asked if he outpaced his wife Michelle in sales.
"It's a tad more but I'm not rubbing it in over dinner," the Harvard alumnus said. "Michelle's attitude is 'boy, you go out and sell some books that's fine because that will pay for some of my shoes."
When discussing his family's extremely mild interest in his book, Obama quipped, "You are never a profit in your own land."
He said his daughters took about a decade to read his first book and he's expecting the same for A Promised Land.
Kimmel then got into the Obamas' family dynamics.
"Your wife told me you're afraid of Sasha, is it true," Kimmel asked.
"Yes," the 44th president said assuredly. "And the reason is because Sasha is a mini-Michelle. And I'm afraid of Michelle."
"Malia is more like me temperamentally," he said after saying Sasha and Michelle share the same facial expressions and attitudes. "And we call ourselves the long faces because her face is more shaped like mine. The round faces are Michelle and Sasha and the round faces are a fiercer tribe."
When Kimmel asked if there are any secret spots someone could take advantage of if they were hiding in the White House in fear they might be removed from office, Obama joked, “Well, I think we can always send the Navy SEALS in there to dig him out.”
With the banter aside, the former president shed light on his true feelings regarding the state of the country post-election.
“I wish the transition was going better, because we lose time during these crises,” Obama said. “When I came in, we were in the middle of a big crisis, the financial crisis. George W. Bush, he and I had obviously big policy differences, but he’s a good man, he’s a patriot. And he ordered everybody on his team to work seamlessly with us on the transition. Could not have been more gracious, could not have been more helpful. And that actually helped us be able to get a head start on trying to stem what could have been a great depression instead of a great recession.”
Later, Obama told the talk show host that he believes Biden is better equipped to handle the crises facing the country because of his experiences working through the recession.
"He knows the job. He understands the gravity of it. He will hit the ground running, most importantly with respect on how to deal with this pandemic," he said. "We set up an entire pandemic playbook and task force inside the White House in the eventuality that something like this would happen. It got disbanded by the current president, but it will be resurrected."
As Blavity previously reported, former First Lady Michelle Obama criticized the sitting president in a now viral social media post made earlier this month, for his scrutiny of the election process.
“This isn’t a game. Our love of country requires us to respect the results of an election even when we don’t like them or wish it had gone differently — the presidency doesn’t belong to any one individual or any one party,” Michelle wrote. “To pretend that it does, to play along with these groundless conspiracy theories — whether for personal or political gain — is to put our country’s health and security in danger.”
Michelle said that in spite of any disagreements the Obama family had with the Trumps, she and her husband honored the transition of power in democracy.
