*Barack Obama responded publicly this week after Donald Trump shared a racist AI-generated video on Truth Social portraying him and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. The post was eventually taken down, though Trump did not apologize for sharing it.
“I don’t take it personally. I mean, I’m always offended when my wife and kids get dragged into things, because they didn’t choose this,” Obama told The New Yorker. “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 previously characterized the Trump Administration as a “clown show.” “I think it’s important to recognize that the majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling. It is true that it gets attention. It’s true that it’s a distraction,” he said on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast.
At the same time, Obama acknowledged that he expects to be a target. “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 told The New Yorker.
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Obama raised concerns about the broader landscape of AI-generated content, citing videos Trump has posted that depict war as a video game and others showing “excrement dumped on ordinary citizens” as examples of where this type of content is heading.
He also addressed what he sees as a shift in acceptable behavior across media and online platforms. “And there’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television,” Obama said on Cohen’s podcast. “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.”
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