President Trump may think Greta Thunberg needs to "chill," but his predecessor's wife thinks the young Swedish climate activist is just fine as is. After Trump called it "ridiculous" this week that Thunberg became Time magazine's youngest ever Person of the Year, telling her to work on her "anger management problem," lots of people rushed to the 16-year-old's corner—including former first lady Michelle Obama, USA Today reports. "Don't let anyone dim your light," Obama tweeted directly to Thunberg. "Like the girls I've met in Vietnam and all over the world, you have so much to offer us all. Ignore the doubters and know that millions of people are cheering you on." Some commenters are saying that current first lady Melania Trump, whose #BeBest initiative is supposed to counter bullying, should be applying her anti-bullying platform to her own husband.
Still, John Brandon at Forbes, who doesn't mind Obama's post, takes issue with the medium of communication. "What's happening with Twitter is that it has become a one-to-many platform for high-profile figures to criticize each other," he writes, even though Obama didn't specifically mention Trump by name. "And, we like to read them. That's the true sign of dysfunction." Meanwhile, Vox takes a deeper dive, noting that Trump's reference implies that Thunberg's upset at the climate crisis isn't from the crisis itself, but from some mental or emotional problems she has, or even her age or gender. "Autistic girls tend to face a lot of pressure not just to act like non-autistic people, but also to live up to the same gendered expectations many girls face," says Julia Bascom, head of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. "We always have to be smiling and compliant." (More Greta Thunberg stories.)
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