Someone finally got around to asking Michelle Obama what was in the blue Tiffany & Co. package Melania Trump gave her on Inauguration Day last year.
Ellen DeGeneres asked the former first lady what was in the box during her first television interview since exiting the White House.
“When the transfer was happening, when Donald Trump and his wife were moving into the White House, there was a gift exchange,” DeGeneres reminded viewers in an episode airing Thursday.
“The Tiffany’s box,” Obama said, nodding.
A year later, the truth can be told: “It was a lovely frame,” Obama told DeGeneres.
It was a slightly awkward moment, as everyone remembers from the pictures.
What a thoughtful, sensible gift from one First Lady to another https://t.co/Bavp8cNlcp
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) January 31, 2018
Michelle Obama breaks down awkward Inauguration gift exchange with Melania Trump https://t.co/0ea0U3MEba pic.twitter.com/6Sj58eGLX1
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 31, 2018
“There’s all this protocol,” she explained. “This is like a state visit, so they tell you that you’re going to do this, they’re going to stand here.”
Michelle told DeGeneres that she wasn’t expecting a present so she didn’t know what to do with it.
“Never before do you get this gift, so I’m sort of like, ‘OK, what am I supposed to do with this gift?'” the former first lady continued.
“Everyone cleared out and no one would come and take the box, and I’m thinking, ‘Do we take the picture with (it)?’ And then my husband saved the day — see he grabbed the box and took it back inside. But everybody cleared out — no staff, no one. I was like, ‘What do you do with the box?'”
She apparently forgot that she had gifted outgoing first lady Laura Bush on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009.
But in a discrete and stealthy move, Mrs. Bush “hid the cream box with red ribbon behind former President Obama’s back for the photo op.”
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