Trump’s racist clip lacks shame: Obama
Former US president says such messaging would hurt Republicans in midterm elections, ‘ultimately, answer is going to come from American people’
WASHIGTON (MNTV) – Former US President Barack Obama has condemned what he called a lack of shame in American politics, responding to a social media post by US President Donald Trump that depicted him and his wife Michelle Obama as apes.
A video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account on Feb. 5 sparked censure across the U.S. political spectrum, with the White House initially rejecting “fake outrage” only to then blame the post on an error by a staff member and take it down.
Close to the end of a one-minute video promoting conspiracies about Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the Obamas, the first Black president and first lady in U.S. history, were shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.
The former US president responded to the video for the first time in an interview with left-wing political podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen.
In the interview Cohen said, “The discourse has devolved into a level of cruelty that we haven’t seen before … Just days ago, Donald Trump put a picture of you, your face on an ape’s body.”
“And so again, we’ve seen the devolution of the discourse. How do we come back from a place that we have fallen into?”
Obama responded without naming Trump by saying the majority of Americans “find this behavior deeply troubling.” “There’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television, and what is true is that there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office, right? That’s been lost.”
Barack Obama predicted that such messaging would hurt Trump’s Republicans in midterm elections, that “ultimately, the answer is going to come from the American people.”
The US president has told reporters he stood by the thrust of the video’s claims about election fraud, but that he had not seen the offensive clip at the end.
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