Former U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday condemned what he called a loss of shame and decorum in American politics, responding for the first time to a social media post by Donald Trump that depicted him and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The 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.
Near 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.
Obama responded to the video for the first time in an interview with left-wing political podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, released 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?"
Without naming Trump, Obama responded 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."
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."
Trump 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.
