Former US president Barack Obama criticised what he described as a decline in shame and decorum in American political discourse, responding on Saturday for the first time to a post shared on Truth Social by Donald Trump that depicted him and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The video, posted on 5 February, prompted condemnation across the US political spectrum. The White House initially dismissed criticism as “fake outrage” before later attributing the post to a staff error and removing it.
Near the end of the one-minute clip, which promoted conspiracy theories about Trump’s 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, the Obamas — the first Black president and first lady in US history — appeared for roughly one second with their faces superimposed on the bodies of monkeys.
Obama addressed the issue publicly for the first time in an interview with left-leaning political podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, released on Saturday.
“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,” Cohen said during the interview. “How do we come back from a place that we have fallen into?”
Without directly naming Trump, Obama said most Americans “find this behaviour 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,” he said.
Obama predicted that such messaging could ultimately harm Republicans aligned with Trump in the midterm elections, adding that “ultimately, the answer is going to come from the American people”.
Trump has told reporters that he stood by the central claims in the video regarding alleged election fraud but said he had not seen the offensive clip at the end.
