Former US President Barack Obama criticized on Saturday lack of respect and decency in US political debate. For the first time, he reacted in this way to a recent post by the acting head of the White House, Donald Trump, on his social network, in which Obama and his wife Michelle depicted as monkeysinforms TASR according to an AFP report.
The video was shared by Trump on his social network Truth Social back on February 5, which sparked a wave of criticism across the US political spectrum, including the camp Republicans. The White House initially dismissed the “fake outrage” but then he deleted the post, while his he blamed the publication on a mistake by one of the White House employees.
It was a conspiracy video promoting theories about Trump losing to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The Obamas – the first African-American president and first lady in US history – in it, they were shown with faces on the bodies of monkeys for about a secondreports AFP.
Obama himself first responded to the video in an interview with left-wing political podcast creator Brian Tyler Cohen, which was published on Saturday. “The discourse has degenerated to a level of cruelty we’ve never seen before… Just a few days ago, Donald Trump put your picture, your face, on the body of a monkey,” Cohen said in an interview.
Without naming Trump, Obama responded by saying that most Americans “find this behavior deeply troubling.” “There is a kind of clown show taking place on social networks and on television, and the truth is that people who once thought they had to have some form of decency, sense of propriety and respect for office are not ashamed of it at all, are they? That’s lost,” noted the former US president.
At the same time, Obama predicted that releasing messages like this will hurt Trump’s Republicans in mid-term electionsand that “the answer will ultimately come from the American people”.
Trump told reporters he stood by the video’s claims about alleged election fraud in 2020, but insisted that he did not see the derogatory note about the Obamas at the end of the aforementioned video.
