A

suddenly we were outdoors. The humid summer air hit our faces. I could see
fireflies blinking on the lawn. And there it was, the hum of the public, people
whooping and celebrating outside the iron gates. It had taken us ten minutes to
get out of our own home, but we’d done it. We were outside, standing on a
patch of lawn off to one side, out of sight of the public but with a beautiful,
close-up view of the White House, lit up in pride.

Malia   and I   leaned  into    each    other,  happy   to  have    found   our way there.

s happens in politics, new winds were already beginning to gather and blow.
By the fall of 2015, the next presidential campaign was in full swing. The
Republican side was crowded, including governors like John Kasich and Chris
Christie and senators like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, plus more than a dozen
others. Meanwhile, Democrats were quickly narrowing themselves toward what
would become a choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the liberal,
longtime independent senator from Vermont.

Donald Trump had announced his candidacy early in the summer, standing
inside Trump Tower in Manhattan and railing on Mexican immigrants
—“rapists,” he called them—as well as the “losers” he said were running the
country. I figured he was just grandstanding, sucking up the media’s attention
because he could. Nothing in how he conducted himself suggested that he was
serious about wanting to govern.

I was following the campaign, but not as intently as in years past. Instead, I’d
been busy working on my fourth initiative as First Lady, called Let Girls Learn,
which Barack and I had launched together back in the spring. It was an
ambitious, government-wide effort focused on helping adolescent girls around
the world obtain better access to education. Over the course of nearly seven years
now as First Lady, I’d been struck again and again by both the promise and the
vulnerability of young women in our world—from the immigrant girls I’d met at
the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager
who’d been brutally attacked by the Taliban and who came to the White House
to speak with me, Barack, and Malia about her advocacy on behalf of girls’
education. I was horrified when, about six months after Malala’s visit, 276
Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram,
seemingly intent on causing other Nigerian families to fear sending their
daughters to school. It had prompted me, for the first and only time during the