Barack Obama is clearly saying he isn’t upset about the racist AI video that President Donald Trump posted. But he is standing up for his family. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Obama talked about the controversy that started in February when Trump shared an AI-generated video on social media. The video showed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, which caused a lot of criticism.
Obama isn’t taking it personally, but he is setting a limit.
“I don’t take it personally,” he said, but added that there’s something he won’t accept. “I’m always offended when my wife and kids get dragged into things, because they didn’t choose this. That’s a line even people whose politics I deeply reject, I would expect them to care about.”
He also said, “I would never talk about somebody’s family in that way.
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The video was posted by 45/47 on Trump’s Truth Social account and later taken down.
It started with audio about fraud in the 2020 election and then cut to a scene where Barack and Michelle’s faces were edited onto apes dancing in a jungle, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” playing in the background.
Still, Barack says the bigger issue isn’t just one offensive video—it’s a bigger trend.
He mentioned other AI clips he found even more disturbing, like ones that portray war like a video game or show crude images of everyday people. He says that’s a deeper problem than just political attacks.
He admits he’s fair game—”you can feel free to pick on me, because I’m your own size,” he said—but doesn’t want to make a career out of responding.
Obama says he’s trying to avoid becoming a daily political commentator, even joking that if he started acting like Jon Stewart, he’d lose his balance as a leader.
In the end, Obama can handle the criticism, but he says some attacks are just out of line.
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