Piers Morgan has accused Michelle Obama of “plunging the b***hy knife firmly into the back of her successor as First Lady, Melania Trump” in his column for the Daily Mail .
Referring to her recent appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon , Morgan accused Michelle of letting herself down with her comments and suggested that she was stooping to new lows in an effort to sell even more copies of her global bestselling book Becoming .
On the show, Fallon showed Michelle a picture of her and President Barack Obama boarding Air Force One for the last time after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“Can you just walk me through…,” Fallon began to ask before Michelle cut him off by saying “Bye Felicia!” in what Piers Morgan described as “a sneering tone.”
For those not familiar with the term “Bye Felicia,” it is an unflattering term which originates from the character Craig, played by Ice Cube, in the 1995 cult comedy movie Friday.
In the movie, the character of Felicia is an annoying girl who is constantly begging and trying to borrow things from other characters. The character of Craig used to dismiss her requests with the phrase “Bye Felicia” in a dismissive tone.
The phrase has now also been picked up by the Twitter generation with the phrase being widely used to dismiss unpleasant people you really want to avoid. Different dictionaries define the term as meaning, “I’m done with you, I have no interest in you, or anything you have to say.”
Piers Morgan notes that Michelle prides herself on being streetwise and in touch with young people and suggests that she was fully aware of what the phrase meant. With the similarity between the names Felicia and Melania, Morgan suggests this was a low and unnecessary slight to the new first lady and went against the long-standing convention that first ladies don’t attack each other because they all know how hard the job is.
If this wasn’t humiliating enough for Melania, Morgan then suggests she went even further by mocking the gift that Melania gave her at the same event.
As Morgan put it in his article, “she said: ‘then the Tiffany’s box..’ and crunched her face into an expression of withering theatrical bemusement” to laughter and cheers from the audience and Jimmy Fallon.
The box contained an expensive Tiffany’s picture frame and was, as Morgan pointed out, similar to the gift that Michelle gave to Laura Bush, wife of George W. Bush, at the inauguration of her husband Barack.
“What I find hard [is] to admire is Michelle Obama’s decision to now publicly mock, denigrate and ridicule her successor, commented Morgan. And I find it even more unpalatable to admire that she did it whilst flogging her new best-selling autobiography. (It’s a great book, by the way).”
“It’s no secret that Michelle and Melania don’t get on, but there is no reason they have to,” he continued. “Their apparent mutual dislike doesn’t mean they should openly criticise each other, particularly as a tool to sell books and make money.”
