Former US president Barack Obama criticised a lack of shame and decorum in the country\u2019s political discourse, responding on Saturday for the first time to a post on Donald Trump\u2019s social media account that depicted him and his wife Michelle as monkeys.<\/p>\n
The video shared on Trump\u2019s Truth Social account on February 5 sparked censure across the US political spectrum, with the White House initially rejecting \u201cfake outrage\u201d only to then blame the post on an error by a staff member and take it down.<\/p>\n
Near the end of a one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Trump\u2019s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the Obamas \u2013 the first black president and first lady in US history \u2013 were shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.<\/p>\n
Obama responded to the video for the first time in an interview with left-wing political podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen released on Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe discourse has devolved into a level of cruelty that we haven\u2019t seen before \u2026 Just days ago, Donald Trump put a picture of you, your face on an ape\u2019s body,\u201d Cohen said in the interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so again, we\u2019ve seen the devolution of the discourse. How do we come back from a place that we have fallen into?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former US president Barack Obama criticised a lack of shame and decorum in the country\u2019s political discourse, responding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,82842,8833,218064,12,3319,25241,3,25242,2186,4637,21,19,22,20,25,24,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-469413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-american-people","10":"tag-barack-obama","11":"tag-brian-tyler-cohen","12":"tag-donald-trump","13":"tag-joe-biden","14":"tag-michelle","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-obama","17":"tag-republicans","18":"tag-truth-social","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa","25":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}