Michelle Obama said the United States is in a “janky” era under President Donald Trump, using a wide-ranging conversation on the IMO Podcast to argue that Americans have lost some of their sense of shared reality. Speaking with her brother, Craig Robinson, and comedian Hasan Minhaj, Obama said, “we’re in just a janky version,” and Minhaj answered, “S**t is jank right now. It’s super jank.”
Obama tied the remarks to the response in Minnesota after federal immigration agents shot and killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, earlier this year while carrying out the administration’s mass deportation orders. She said Minnesota was a “powerful reminder of what a community of people can do and are willing to do to protect one another,” adding, “When you’re not so janky, you don’t have to prove that, right? And so we haven’t been this janky for a while.”
The comments came during a podcast discussion, not in an official government setting, but they landed in the middle of a national argument over immigration enforcement, public trust and the state of political life under Trump. Obama said the country has moved through versions before, calling this one a necessary but rough period of growth, and she argued that people had let their guard down about what they believed to be true. “And I think our muscle of understanding our truth just got a little lax,” she said. “We started taking things for granted, right.”
What Obama described was not just frustration with the moment but a warning about what happens when communities stop paying attention. Her answer was plain: she said the country is in a messy phase, but Minnesota showed that people can still rally to protect one another when the pressure becomes real.
