Politics has become a cheap joke - Obama responds to Trump’s racist video

US President Donald Trump often shares pictures, videos or memes made with AI (artificial intelligence) on his social media platform Truth Social. Recently, he shared one such video, in which former US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama are presented as monkeys. This has led to a storm of criticism and condemnation in the United States. This time, Barack Obama has directly criticized Trump for that video.

He has called such actions of Trump as an extreme degradation of American political etiquette. Obama said that politics has now become a 'clown show' or cheap joke. He said this in a podcast interview with political analyst Brian Tyler Cohen on Sunday (February 15).

In the podcast, Obama said, 'Those who once respected the dignity and etiquette of office no longer have any shame. The level of cruelty that American political discourse has now reached has never been seen before.’

On February 5, Donald Trump shared the 1-minute AI video on his Truth social account. At the end of the video, the Obama couple’s faces are shown for just one second with the bodies of monkeys. The popular song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ plays in the background of that scene.

The video also claims that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged and blames the ballot counting company Dominion Voting Systems for ‘stealing’ the election.

Initially, the White House dismissed the issue as a ‘fake outrage’ created by the media. Later, in the face of intense criticism, they removed the video, citing a staffer’s mistake. Trump then told reporters that while he supported the main claim of the video (election rigging), he did not notice the offensive part at the end. He expressed regret for it. But he said he would not apologize.

In the interview, Obama strongly criticized not only racism, but also the Trump administration's tough anti-immigration campaign in Minnesota. He compared the shooting deaths of two American citizens (Rennie Goode and Alex Pretty) by federal agents there to the behavior of "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" countries. He said, "Such uncontrolled behavior by federal government agents is very worrying and dangerous."

Meanwhile, due to this conflict over the immigration issue, a partial impasse or 'shutdown' has begun in the US Department of Homeland Security since February 14. Democrats have made it clear that they will not approve any new funds for the agency until there is a change in the behavior of immigration enforcement or ICE officials.

Source: Al Jazeera.