The children are in danger!

In thiller-writing classes, that's always the biggest theme to use when seeking to grip and intensify readers' attention. I know, I've attended some pretty good ones.

Which is why Michelle Obama's claims about "the children are in danger!" in her new memoir, titled 'Becoming' and directed at President Trump, rings more like thriller- and bestseller-shilling than an honest memoir.

Here's what's getting headlines as she seeks to sell her new book at those big stadium appearances:

“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she writes. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”

Because let's unpack this. Trump made his birther comments, which got a whiff of attention, but also got him dismissed, ignored and ridiculed at the time. He probably wasn't even right about the matter, because President Obama did release a birth certificate to disprove the claims, and evidence emerged that his birth was announced in a Hawaii newspaper in 1961 and Hawaii's Republican governor, Linda Lingle, confirmed that there was no hanky panky. Trump has since dumped the claim.

Trump's birther claims in fact drew him so much scoffing at the time that President Obama used them as the occasion to ridicule Trump personally at a 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner with Trump in the audience. Obama ridiculed Trump so mercilessly there's speculation that the speech drove Trump run for president as a result.

Rest assured, Trump didn't gain anything from his birther claims and he certainly wasn't either the first or the only person to be making them, just the easiest target and ultimately, the most consequential.

But here we have a special dark conspiracy coming from the Michelle Obama about Trump's claim at the time as being a stirrer of "wingnuts and kooks" and therefore threat to her children. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”

Like that sort of thing has even remotely happened in the Tea Party era of seven to twelve years ago, during the Obama heyday, back when leftist mobs hadn't gotten the ball rolling on this sort of thing. Yes, violence is happening politically now, as the assault on Fox News host Tucker Carlson's residence shows, as well as the shooting of GOP House leader Rep. Steve Scalise and the bone-breaking assault on GOP Sen. Rand Paul, all by leftists, show. I'm not going to even get into the restaurant chase-outs or the Democratic congressional leaders' calls for violence. Virtually all of the ongoing violence is the work of the left.

Yet somehow there was a threat of violence from Republican "kooks and wingnuts"? The people who got targeted by the Obama IRS? Because those people were the ones Obama was calling "kooks and wingnuts" at the time. Some danger.

But now she says there was a danger, (that and not other things, which may well have been dangers) and she Blames Trump.

It's rings hollow not just because the 'kooks' of the era were not violent people, but because Michelle Obama, was about as aloof a parent as possible, bringing in her mother to watch them because she couldn't be bothered, taking solo vacation trips to Barcelona and quite a few other places without them, and now she's Mama Bear? The same parent whose kids drifted off to pot-smoking fests and other not-so-good things that are often the result of parental neglect? That doesn't ring all that true either. The Obamas have always been rather weird as parents, refusing to even give their kids Christmas presents, saying they get plenty of presents during the year. It makes you wonder whether the kids were really brought up at all.

So now here we are, Michelle Obama unloading on Trump and trying to whip up her Democratic base as a result of it with the oldest trick in the thriller-writing book: The Children Are In Danger.

What I suspect is Michelle Obama is trying to sell books and with the Obamas of late drawing empty stadiums in these past midterms, maybe the need to spike things up to sell books was necessary. File under 'fiction.'

Image credit: Twitter screengrab