Reaction to the US President Trump’s racist video attacking the Obamas was initially called ‘fake outrage’
Barack Obama has finally addressed the racist video that was shared by the current occupier of the Oval Office, which depicted the former President and First Lady as apes.
The offensive video, which was shared from President Trump’s Truth Social account, showed America’s first black president and his wife as primates while the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ plays in the background.
It played as a small clip at the end of a larger video making unsubstantiated claims about election fraud, yet as the White House was first asked why the president had shared shared such racist imagery, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt decried the questions as ‘fake outrage’.
Speaking on the latest episode of Brian Taylor Cohen’s podcast, Obama said: “First of all, I think it’s important to recognise that the majority of the American people find this behaviour deeply troubling,”
These comments have been Obama’s first since the video was shared, which the White House ultimately blamed on a junior staffer after its claims of fake outrage did nothing to quell the fury from many black Republicans over the racist clip.
At the time, Senator Tim Scott simply called it ‘the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House’.
Typically for the former president, he did not want to get into the weeds about why the video had been shared from Trump’s account. Instead he set it in a wider context: “It is true that it gets attention. It’s true that it’s a distraction.
“You meet people, they still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness, and there’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television.”
Yet Press Secretary Leavitt’s initial response to claims that the video was racist, was to tell the public to not believe their eyes, saying: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
And as Trump was pressed on if he would apologize to his predecessor, he asked what he had to apologize for. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told a reporter.
Not that this went unnoticed by the former president, who used his typical tact to not mention Trump by name but blast the lack of ‘decorum’ in public office.
He said: “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.”
