Barack Obama doesn’t take many things personally, unless his wife and kids are involved.
In a new feature for The New Yorker, the former President was asked about his response to President Donald Trump posting a video earlier this year depicting him and Michelle Obama as apes in the jungle. Obama opted for a tactful approach.
“I don’t take it personally,” Obama told writer Peter Selvin. “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.”
Obama said he found greater concern from Trump’s use of A.I.-generated videos that treated war, such as the one in Iran, “like a video game” and showed “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 wryly.
In his original response in February, Obama called Trump’s actions “deeply troubling,” citing the views of Americans across the country. In a chat with Brian Tyler Cohen for his podcast, Obama called the moment, like many of Trump’s actions on the social media site, a “distraction” while also signaling that a respect for the office of the presidency had been “lost.”
“You know, it is true that it gets attention. It’s true that it’s a distraction,” Obama said. “But, you know, as I’m traveling around the country, as you’re traveling around the country, 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.”
He added, “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.”
In the fallout from the video, Congressman Al Green held up a sign during the State of the Union Address, saying that ‘Black People Aren’t Apes.’ The White House initially blamed the video posting on a staffer, but Trump later confirmed he posted it and said he did nothing wrong.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake…I look at thousands of things…and I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine,” Trump said at the time. “I didn’t know about it. So, I mean, it went up. I really have no message.”
