Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor and former “Today” host who now fronts “The Megyn Kelly Show,” told her audience on Monday, August 31, 2026, that former President Barack Obama should divorce his wife, Michelle Obama, branding the former first lady a “stone-hearted sociopath” after playing a podcast clip in which she imitated her husband choking up.
The clip Kelly aired came from an October 2025 episode of “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson,” the podcast the author of the memoir “Becoming” co-hosts. On that episode, Michelle Obama looked back on the day the family moved Malia Obama, their eldest, into her college dorm, saying she handled the bed and the arranging of the room while her husband seemed unsure of where he should even stand. Joking, she said the couple handed him an Ikea lamp to put together, that the lamp required no assembly at all, and that he busied himself with it for something like two hours anyway.
She went on to recount the drive back to Air Force One, saying the motorcade had fallen silent when she noticed sniffling beside her. She imitated the snorting sounds, said agents asked the former president whether he was okay, and said she told him to go ahead and let the tears out. Kelly, who watched the playback alongside guest Jesse Kelly, said the impression was meant to embarrass him. In her reading, Barack Obama is the emotional half of the pair, and he was fighting back tears because his wife feels next to nothing.
Kelly Tells the Obamas to Split
The children are adults now, Kelly said, so the couple should simply end the marriage. She insisted that Barack Obama would face no difficulty at all in finding a woman who genuinely loved him, cheered him on, and looked at him with stars in her eyes.
Divorce is what they ought to do, she went on, arguing that the pair plainly have no love for one another and that Michelle Obama is not capable of loving her husband. She asked how he could possibly love a “steaming heap of nastiness,” said nobody falls in love with a “steaming heap of negativity,” and claimed that negativity defines the former first lady’s attitude toward everything.
Kelly also worked in a clip from a 2025 appearance by Michelle Obama on “The Diary of a CEO,” in which she told couples that trouble in a marriage is not their fault but a feature of the institution itself, and that children, however loved, are a hassle. Kelly pointed as well to an earlier “IMO” conversation with podcast guest Angie Martinez, in which the former first lady said she was glad she never had a boy because she worried a son would take after his father.
What Michelle Obama Told Jon Stewart
The comments that drew Kelly’s fire aired on the August 26 episode of the podcast, when “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart asked Michelle Obama about life with Malia, 28, and Sasha Obama, 25, grown and out of the house. “I don’t miss them. I don’t,” she told Stewart.
Stewart said he missed the sense of meaning and routine his children brought to his own life and asked whether she felt the same. She answered no, and said she is content with a rhythm and a calendar that belong entirely to her. She added that she loves her daughters and was seeing them for dinner that evening.
Rumors That Swirled in January 2025
Kelly has picked over the state of the Obamas’ marriage before. In January 2025, she addressed a wave of separation rumors on her show, saying she could not vouch for them but that confirmation would shake Democratic circles and the wider country, and that she could not recall a presidential divorce in modern times. She said the rumor mill appeared to be gaining momentum, and she cited Michelle Obama’s absences from former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral and from President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
That chatter had been fed by a post on X on January 22, 2025, which circulated a screenshot of a purported leaked direct message, said to be from a friend of actress Jennifer Aniston, asserting that Aniston and Barack Obama were involved. Days earlier, on January 17, 2025, Barack Obama had posted a photograph of the couple with an affectionate birthday message for his wife, and she replied publicly. The two met in 1989 at the law firm Sidley Austin LLP and married in 1992.
On the August 31 broadcast, Kelly widened her criticism beyond the family, faulting Michelle Obama for what she cast as nonstop grievances about the eight years the family spent in the White House, among them covering the cost of their own food and needing a three-person glam squad. That dislike, Kelly argued, extends past her husband and her children to her time in the residence itself, with a single exception: the schedule the former first lady keeps now.
