“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 said. “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 added to his daughter. “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 added, per People magazine. “And I intend to continue to try to do that.”
In a 2021 interview with CBS News Sunday Morning, Bush expressed that he was “shocked” by the public’s reaction to the moment. “The American people were so surprised that Michelle Obama and I could be friends,” he said.
In 2019, Obama told Hager that she and Bush could set aside their political differences and acknowledge their shared 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.”
After the death of former President George H.W. Bush, who was George W. Bush’s father, in late 2018, the former first lady canceled two scheduled appearances on her “Becoming” book tour to attend the funeral in Washington. It was at this event that Bush established a tradition of handing her another piece of candy.
Speaking to Today earlier that same year, Obama had said of Bush 43, “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.”
Although Bush referred to the object he gave Obama at McCain’s funeral as an Altoid in his latest interview, Obama previously described it as 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!’” the former first lady told then-hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie. Moments like those are “what people are hungry for,” she added.
“Party doesn’t separate us,” she said. “Color, gender — those kinds of things don’t separate us. It’s the message that we send.”
Despite what the Obamas say now, Barack Obama criticized Bush’s presidency relentlessly on the campaign trail in 2008, particularly blaming him for economic turmoil and foreign policy failures during his campaign speeches.
Obama claimed that the policies of Bush had led to significant problems for the American people, asserting that “America, we are better than these last eight years.”