The former President George W. Bush is speaking out this week to discuss his viral friendship with the former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Bush Talks Obama Friendship
On Tuesday, Bush, 79, sat down with his daughter Jenna Bush Hager for an interview that aired on the TODAY show. During their discussion, Bush opened up about his unlikely friendship with Obama, 62. This came after the two of them shared a viral moment at the 2018 funeral of the late Senator John McCain. There, Bush was seen slipping Obama what appeared to be a piece of candy.
“I get a little antsy, as I’m sure you know, and I was sitting next to Michelle. That’s who I sit next to at funerals,” Bush recalled. “And I was kind of teasing her and stuff, and I slipped her an Altoid. Not as a joke, but I thought she might want one.”
“And I got in the car afterwards, and you said, ‘You’re trending,’” he continued to Bush Hager, 43. “I didn’t know what trending meant.”
“It turns out, the country is starved to see a white, center-right Republican and an African American center-left Democrat having fun and being able to converse, not as political figures but as citizens,” Bush alleged. “And I intend to continue to try to do that.”
In 2021, Bush admitted to CBS News Sunday Morning that he was “shocked” by the public’s reaction to this moment.
“The American people were so surprised that Michelle Obama and I could be friends,” he said at the time.
Obama Weighs In
As for Obama, she told Bush Hager in 2019 that though she and Bush have different political views, they are able to look past that because they have the same values.
“We disagree on policy, but we don’t disagree on humanity, we don’t disagree about love and compassion,” she said. “I think that’s true for all of us — it’s just that we get lost in our fear of what’s different.”
In 2018, Obama gushed over Bush, saying that he “is my partner in crime at every major thing where all the formers gather. So we’re together all the time, and I love him to death.”
Watch Obama talk more about that in the video below.
Though Bush claims that the candy that he gave Obama at McCain’s funeral was an Altoid, she has described it as being an “old cough drop.”
“That’s the funny thing, because they were in the little White House box, and I was like, ‘How long have you had these?’ And he said, ‘A long time, we got a lot of these!’” Obama claimed. She went on to allege that moments like those are “what people are hungry for.”
“Party doesn’t separate us,” she concluded. “Color, gender — those kinds of things don’t separate us. It’s the message that we send.”
We are living in a time when Americans are more divided than ever over politics. That’s what makes Bush and Obama’s friendship all the more surprising. Whether you like Bush and Obama or not, this serves as a reminder that we really can get along with people who have different political views than ours if we try.