Former US President Barack Obama, who was also the first black President of America, has reacted to a “racist” video President Donald Trump posted on social media, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The MAGA leader was hit with a firestorm of backlash, sparking a new wave of controversy, after the video made it to the Internet earlier this month.
Even Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, came down hard on Trump for it, calling it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
Barack Obama reacts to Trump’s AI ape video
Obama spoke out about the now-deleted video featuring racist caricatures likening black people to apes during a recent interview with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, without actually name-dropping Trump.
Early into the conversation, Cohen brought up a question about the discourse devolving “into a level of cruelty that we haven’t seen before.” He raised the issue about how quite a lot of things that may have been deemed disqualifying a few years ago had just become the norm all of a sudden, and were at time even actually rewarded.
Dropping instances of such exacerbating the situation, he mentioned the current administration labelling “victims of ICE’s aggression” as “domestic terrorists,” and how even Trump had recently put a picture of Obama’s face on an ape’s body.
Cohen asked, “We’ve seen the devolution of the discourse. How do we come back from a place that we have fallen into?”
Countering claims that such developments had become the status quo, Obama said that it was crucial to recognise that the majority of Americans found this “deeply troubling.” He highlighted that while it “gets attention,” it was also true that it was nothing more than a “distraction.”
“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 went on.
“There’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television,” the ex-president continued, “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.”
Turning to the widespread protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Minneapolis, Obama added, “The reason I point out that I don’t think the majority of the American people approve of this is because ultimately, the answer is going to come from the American people. We just saw this in Minnesota.”
“So the rogue behavior of agents of the federal government is deeply concerning and dangerous.”
Obama also highlighted that it was important “to appreciate the extraordinary outpouring of organizing, community building, decency, neighbors buying groceries for folks, accompanying children to school, teachers who were standing up for their kids, not just randomly, but in a systematic, organized way, citizens saying, “this is not the America we believe in,” and we’re going to fight back, and we’re going to push back with the truth and with cameras and with peaceful protests and shining a light on the sort of behavior that in the past, we’ve seen in authoritarian countries and we’ve seen in dictatorships, but we have not seen in America.”
What was the Obama video?
The AI ape clip was one of several posts shared as part of Trump’s social media activity in the late hours of February 5 and early hours of February 6. A brief segment at the end of a video featured a clip, playing to the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,’ showed the faces of the Obamas superimposed on the bodies of two apes, as they appear to be a jungle.
Although the major portion of the video contained unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election, the last “racist” bit sparked massive outrage among both Democrats and Republicans.
On his part, when confronted about the video, Trump previously told reporters on Air Force Once that he didn’t intend to apologise as he hadn’t made a mistake because he had only seen the start of the video before it was posted by a staff member. As per his account, he never knew that the clip contained such a depiction of the Obamas.
At one point, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt came to Trump’s defence by saying that the clip pictured Trump “as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.”
The post was ultimately deleted on February 6.