Obama blasts ‘clown show’ after Trump’s racist monkey video
The ex-president said most Americans ‘find this behaviour deeply troubling’ and it will hurt the Republicans in the midterm election
Former US president Barack Obama criticised a lack of shame and decorum in the country’s political discourse, responding on Saturday for the first time to a post on Donald Trump’s social media account that depicted him and his wife Michelle as monkeys.
The video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account on February 5 sparked censure across the US 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.
Near the end of a one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the Obamas – the first black president and first lady in US history – were shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.
Obama responded to the video for the first time in an interview with left-wing 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 in the interview.
“And so again, we’ve seen the devolution of the discourse. How do we come back from a place that we have fallen into?”