Khaberni - Former U.S. President Barack Obama criticized the "lack of decency and propriety" in the political discourse of the United States, and responded on Saturday for the first time to a post on Donald Trump's social media account depicting him and his wife Michelle as two monkeys.
The video, which was posted on Trump's Truth Social platform on February 5, drew condemnation from members of both the Republican and Democratic parties alike. While the White House initially dismissed "manufactured outrage," it later attributed the responsibility to a staffer who, it said, had posted it by mistake.
In the closing segment of the video, which promotes conspiracy theories about Trump's loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden, the faces of Obama and his wife Michelle appear on two monkey figurines for about a second.
Obama responded to the post for the first time in an interview with leftist political podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, which was published on Saturday.
In response to a question from Cohen about the video, Obama said that the majority of Americans "find this behavior very alarming" without naming Trump specifically.
He added: "There is a kind of farce happening on social media and on television, and the truth is that it doesn't seem there is any shame about it among those who previously felt that you should demonstrate a certain level of decency, taste, and respect for the office, right? That has been lost."
Obama stated that such posts could hurt the Republicans aligned with Trump in the midterm elections, indicating that "the response will ultimately come from the American people."
Trump told reporters that he stands by the election fraud claims addressed in the video but denied having watched it.
On another note, Obama also condemned the operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota in the same interview, comparing their behavior to that prevalent "in dictatorial regimes."
Over several weeks, thousands of federal agents, including those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, conducted raids and arrests, which the Trump administration said were targeted missions against criminals, until the operation ended this week.
Obama described the "deviant behavior of federal agents as concerning and dangerous."
He described the behavior of the federal agents, which included two deadly shootings, as of the kind "we've seen in the past in authoritarian countries and in dictatorial regimes."
