Former U.S. President Barack Obama has spoken out about the racist video that depicts him and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, a video that current U.S. President Donald Trump shared on social media, deleted, and then claimed he “didn’t make a mistake” by posting.
In his interview with the former president, political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen cited the racist video as an example of public discourse devolving into cruelty, and Cohen asked Obama how American society can come back from that place.
“First of all, I think it’s important to recognize that the majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling,” Obama replied. “You know, it is true that it gets attention. It’s true that it’s a distraction.”
But such behavior is not what Obama sees across America, he explained. “As I’m traveling around the country, as you’re traveling around the country, you meet people. They still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness,” he said. “And 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? So that’s been lost.”
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Trump shared the offending clip, which paired the racist imagery with conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, in a Truth Social post on February 5. The next morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the clip “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King” and deemed the ensuing backlash “fake outrage,” per The New York Times.
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But the outrage seemed very real. Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Trump ally, said the video was “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” the Times reported.
Aboard Air Force One on February 6, Trump claimed he only watched the first part of the video and didn’t see the ape depiction and suggested it was a staffer who posted it, as seen in a USA Today video. He also declined to apologize, saying, “No, I didn’t make a mistake. I look at a lot of, thousands of things. I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
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