Obama reacts to Trump sharing Racist Monkey Video

Speaking publicly for the first time after United States President Donald Trump’s social media account depicted him and his wife Michelle as monkeys, former President Barack Obama has deplored the degradation of the country’s political discourse to a “clown show”. “[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 said in a wide-ranging podcast interview with left-wing political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen on Saturday The video, shared on Trump’s Truth Social account on February 5, prompted 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 then taking it down. Near the end of the 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. “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?” he added. Without mentioning Trump’s name, Obama said a majority of Americans “find this behaviour deeply troubling”, adding that it will hurt the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.