Almost three months after US President Donald Trump published an AI-generated video depicting Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama as apes on social media, the Former President is now sharing his thoughts. While speaking to The New Yorker, Obama gave a straightforward reaction to the clip, saying he didn’t take it personally.
Barack Obama says he didn’t take Donald Trump’s actions personally
Barack Obama is finally setting the record straight about the viral ape video controversy, which showed him and his wife, Michelle Obama, as apes. While speaking about the AI-generated clip published by President Donald Trump, he said that he didn’t take the clip personally. “I don’t take it personally,” Obama said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I mean, I’m always offended when my wife and kids get dragged into things, because they didn’t choose this…That’s a line that even people whose politics I deeply reject, I would expect them to care about. I would never talk about somebody’s family in that way.”
In fact, per the article, the former President said he is more concerned about AI-generated videos that Trump and the White House have posted that treat war “like a video game” and show “excrement dumped on ordinary citizens.” “I mean, I’m a fair target in the sense of, yeah, you can feel free to pick on me, because I’m your own size,” he said.
This is not the only time Obama has spoken about the video. He talked about the clip for the first time with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, saying that “majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling.” The former US president even agreed that it’s “true” that such type of clips “gets attention” and is “distraction,” but when he travels around the country, he meets people, “they still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness.”
“There’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television,” he said, adding, “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.”
