Former President Barack Obama surfaced on Brian Tyler Cohen's podcast to address the viral video President Trump shared on Truth Social — an election conspiracy clip that depicted Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.

According to the Washington Examiner, Trump took the video down earlier this month and said on Feb. 6 that he hadn't watched the full clip. He declined to apologize while acknowledging the depiction was "some kind of a picture that people don't like" and that he "wouldn't like it either."

Obama used the moment to deliver a sprawling meditation on decency, community, and — inevitably — the failings of everyone who isn't Barack Obama.

"There's this sort of clown show that's happening in social media and on television. 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."

Respect for the office. That's the frame Obama chose. And it's worth pausing on — not because it's wrong to want decorum, but because of who's demanding it and what they're really after.

The Decorum Play

Obama's complaint isn't new. It's the same grievance the political establishment has nursed since 2015: the rules changed, and the people who mastered the old rules don't like it. The appeal to "respect for the office" sounds noble in isolation. But it carries an unspoken assumption — that the office was being respected just fine when the permanent bureaucratic class was running the show unchallenged, when presidents spoke in careful paragraphs and governed by focus group.

Trump broke that mold. Voters chose him for it — twice. The video in question was indefensible on its face, and Trump removed it. He acknowledged as much on Feb. 6, but Obama isn't interested in the correction. He's interested in the sermon.

That's the tell. Obama didn't come on a podcast to condemn a specific image. He came to relitigate the entire Trump era as a collapse of civilizational standards — while positioning himself, once again, as the adult in a room only he can see.

The Self-Aware Moment Obama Buried

Buried beneath the lecture on decorum was something genuinely interesting: Obama admitted that Democrats have a messaging problem. He said the party came off as "scolds" to voters on certain issues and described it as "virtue-signaling." He suggested the party's message needs to be "none of us are perfect."

This is a remarkable concession from the man whose coalition invented modern political scolding. For eight years, the Obama era treated disagreement as ignorance and opposition as bigotry. The entire progressive infrastructure — from campus speech codes to corporate DEI mandates — grew under his watch. Now, from the safety of a friendly podcast, he calls it virtue-signaling.

He's not wrong. But the timing is conspicuous. Democrats didn't lose because voters suddenly stopped caring about kindness. They lost because voters got tired of being told they were bad people by a party that confused moral preening with governance. Obama sees the problem clearly enough to name it. Whether his party can act on it is another matter entirely.

Bad Bunny and the 'Beloved Community'

Obama then pivoted to the recent Super Bowl halftime performance by Bad Bunny, calling it "smart" for demonstrating "what a community is." He invoked Dr. King's concept of "the beloved community" and painted a picture of intergenerational joy:

"People who did not speak Spanish and have never been to Puerto Rico, they saw that elderly woman serving a drink and the kids dancing with their grandmas, and it was intergenerational. And it was a reminder of what Dr. King called 'the beloved community' can look like, which is not perfect, and it's messy sometimes... but there was a sense of, 'All right, there's room for everybody here,' and that, I think, is where we win."

There's a word doing heavy lifting in that last clause: "win." Not "heal." Not "unite." Win. Obama framed a halftime show as a political strategy. The beautiful multicultural moment he described — genuine as it may have been for the people involved — became, in his telling, a weapon in the Democratic toolkit. Community as campaign ad.

This is the contradiction Obama has never resolved. He speaks the language of unity while sorting everything into competitive categories. Republicans practice "the mean, angry, exclusive, us/them, divisive politics," he said, while Democrats are "coming together." It's a tidy binary — one that requires you to forget that Obama himself just spent the interview dividing the country into people with decency and people without it.

The 2026 Question

Washington Examiner Executive Editor Bob Cusack said last week that the Republican Party is off to "a very bad start" ahead of the 2026 elections, predicting that the controversy from Trump's video won't disappear before November. He also noted that people will want to know the identity of the staffer who posted the video. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives, and the margin for error is nonexistent.

There's a legitimate tactical conversation to be had about unforced errors and message discipline heading into a midterm cycle. That's a conversation worth having inside the conservative movement — on conservative terms, focused on winning and governing effectively.

But Obama isn't offering that conversation. He's offering Democrats a narrative: that Trump's presidency is a moral emergency that justifies whatever coalition-building exercise they can stage next. The halftime show. The podcast circuit. The invocation of Dr. King. It's all content in service of "where we win."

What Obama Really Wants

Obama called the current moment a "distraction" and said most people in the country find Trump's behavior "deeply troubling." He offered no evidence for that claim beyond his own travels. It's the kind of assertion that sounds authoritative coming from a former president and collapses the moment you remember that the current president won the election.

What Obama wants is permission to reenter the arena without the accountability of being in it. The podcast, the moral clarity, the wistful references to community — it's a shadow campaign for relevance. He can't run again. His chosen successor lost. His party's bench is thin and fractured. So he does what he's always done best: he talks.

And the talk is good. It always has been. But voters have heard this speech before. They heard it in 2016, when decorum was supposed to carry Hillary Clinton into the White House. They heard it in 2024. Both times, they chose differently.

Obama called it a clown show. Sixty-some million voters called it an election.