By Nick Catoggio
Friday, February 06, 2026
A weird tic appears in certain critics whenever the
president does something particularly loathsome, like dancing
on the grave of a critic who was just stabbed to death by his son. They’ll
hop onto social media and declare, with great solemnity, that our children
and grandchildren will struggle to fathom how we put this man in charge.
Will they?
The opposite is more likely. Having come of age during
Donald Trump’s presidency and inherited the slimy third-world political culture
he’s creating, our children and grandchildren won’t bat an eye in hindsight at
his antics. They’re marinating in a sludge of postliberalism, economic
dislocation, and social-media anomie, as oblivious to their environment as fish
are to water. What follows this era, after they inherit America, might
plausibly make Trump seem decorous by comparison.
The moral trajectory of a
postliterate society is clear and remorseless. It will not shock easily.
I certainly wasn’t shocked this morning to find that the
president had posted a video featuring
a brief shot of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. That shot was taken from a longer fan-created
clip depicting various Democrats as animals; press secretary Karoline Leavitt
pointed back to it in a statement defending the president’s post, noting that
the Obama footage “is from an Internet meme video depicting President Trump as
the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.”
There are no apes in The Lion King, though, as
others noted on Twitter this morning. Even if there were, a zillion other clips
of the Obamas are available online that could have been used in the video that
Trump published. Opting for one of the few that portrayed them as primates was
a choice. And in light of his history, the president is owed no benefit of the
doubt as to his innocent intentions: Demagoging
Obama along racial lines is what made him a force in right-wing politics to
begin with.
“Trump posts racist image of first black president”
barely counts as news in 2026. It’s a dog-bites-man story (in more than one
sense). I hadn’t even intended to write about it, as the depravity of the
modern right and its leaders is ground that’s been well plowed in this
newsletter over the past three and a half years.
But then something genuinely newsy happened. A few
Republicans criticized the president for posting the video and, within a few
hours, it was
taken down and blamed on a staffer.
(The archived version is here.)
Most notable was Tim Scott, the
GOP’s lone African American senator and a longstanding Trump ally. “Praying it
was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,”
he said of the video. “The president should remove it.” (I appreciate his
insinuation that the White House is frequently guilty of racist things, just
not this racist.) House Republican Mike Lawler chimed
in too, and in stronger terms: “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly
offensive—whether intentional or a mistake—and should be deleted immediately
with an apology offered.”
Man bites dog. That’s interesting. What gives?
Devil’s bargain.
The easy (and usually correct) answer is self-interest.
Scott and Lawler each have an unusual amount of skin in the electoral game this
November.
Scott is chairman this cycle of the National Republican Senatorial Committee,
the group spearheading the GOP’s national strategy to hold the Senate. Lawler
is one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House, representing a D +1
district in New York. The last thing either needs given the headwinds they’re
facing is Trump busting out Jim Crow stereotypes for a predecessor with a 59
percent favorable rating and his possibly
more popular wife.
Obama supporters will be angry, African Americans will
take personal offense, and the wider electorate may be moved to reflect on
whether the behavior of the former or current president is the more
ape-like of the two. One has a limited
vocabulary, an alleged history of failing
to restrain his primal urges, and a habit of ruling his party like an
800-pound silverback imposing his will on timid beta males, and it ain’t the
black guy.
Arguably Scott and Lawler were simply protecting
themselves and their party by disavowing Trump’s video, an elementary example
of self-interest at work—but if so, that’s still pretty interesting. After all,
why are Republicans suddenly worried about voters’ moral outrage at the
president after 10 years of coup attempts, criminal indictments (plus one
conviction), sexual misconduct allegations, Access Hollywood videos, and
many, many, many “mean tweets”?
That was all a matter of public record when Americans
handed him the presidency and a popular-vote victory in 2024. Didn’t most of us
long ago grow numb to his dog-bites-man moral offenses, making today’s
disavowals unnecessary?
Maybe not. The tolerance some voters have traditionally
had for Trump’s personal putrescence could be less a case of numbness than of
cynicism. I’ve described their relationship to him before as a
devil’s bargain in the ruthlessly transactional spirit of the president
himself: Americans were willing to accept four more years of moral insanity in
return for bringing back the economic growth and lower cost of living of 2019.
Because Trump has failed to keep up his end of that
bargain, dissatisfied Americans might be deciding that they no longer need to
keep up their end of it either. If so, the “mean tweets” that were eye-rolled
away during his first term will hit differently now—insults added to the injury
voters have suffered from watching him sneer
at affordability as
a second- or third-tier concern. (I mean, for cripes’ sake.)
Remove the electorate’s economic incentive to rationalize having chosen a
villainous president and, go figure, it might stop doing so.
Scott and Lawler aren’t crazy to worry about it.
Mean tweets.
It was also easier for the average joe to ignore the
“mean tweets” when figures like James Mattis and John Kelly were working to
keep the president on the rails. In Trump 1.0, a swing voter who had rolled the
dice on him over Hillary Clinton might dismiss something like the Obama video
as an unfortunate eccentricity of a president whose administration at least
governed more responsibly than it tweeted. Not anymore, though.
Unrestrained by Congress and enabled by a staff of
postliberal lackeys after his own heart, Trump’s second term has functioned as
a sort of mathematical proof that those of us who saw something pathological
and disqualifying in his “mean tweets” were correct to do so. It’s not just the
major grotesqueries, like menacing Denmark over Greenland or creating a secret
police force to enforce immigration law or bribe-taking
on a world-historic scale. It’s the petty megalomaniacal stuff—the
ballroom, the Kennedy
Center, the triumphal
arch.
Just yesterday, Axios
reported that the president recently offered Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer a
deal that would have freed up billions in funding for a major infrastructure
project in New York. His ask: He wanted Schumer to support renaming Penn
Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.
That’s the kind of thing that makes the “mean tweets” hit
differently this time. In context, they seem less like trivial excesses driven
by the gonzo insult-comic side of Trump’s persona than the madness of a
would-be Caesar who’s losing his inhibitions and his mind. When the U.S.
ambassador to Poland recently threatened to
blacklist the new speaker of that country’s parliament for refusing to support
the president’s Nobel Peace Prize bid, one Polish MP responded by comparing
Trump explicitly
to Nero.
Through that lens, the Obama video isn’t the act of an
impish edgelord who occasionally misjudges the red line when trying to provoke.
It’s a case of fiddling as Rome burns by a twisted authoritarian who’s
accountable to no one. I wonder, in fact, whether Trump’s renewed
obsession with Obama isn’t his way of coping with the reality that he’s lost the country: His
resentment of his more popular predecessor, a darling of the elites whose
approval the president has always craved (and who, unlike him, didn’t need to
get his Nobel Peace Prize secondhand),
is flaring as his own support declines.
Off the bandwagon.
So perhaps Americans’ patience for his petty villainy is
finally (finally) wearing thin, eroded by foolish policy priorities,
churlish ruthlessness toward U.S. allies and political enemies, and an economy
that hasn’t delivered on expectations. For swing voters and young voters who
didn’t pay close attention to politics during his first term, his behavior over
the past year may have come as a sincere
revelation, belated proof that the Orange Man Is Bad after all. The “Mom
Confession” surely isn’t a phenomenon restricted to
Saturday Night Live.
But for others, who knew what the country was getting
into by reelecting him and were fine with it, watching his popularity slide may
be stirring a cynical sort of opportunistic moral reawakening. If Trump is
destined to be despised, it’s in their own interest to at least feign some
of the misgivings that other Americans feel.
And I don’t just mean elected Republicans like Scott and
Lawler. Yesterday one of the president’s dependable apologists, author Eric
Metaxas, was aghast—or pretended to be, at least—over Trump’s
boorish speech at a religious event. “Didn’t anyone on the President’s team
advise him that the National Prayer Breakfast is a prayer breakfast?” he wrote.
“Didn’t someone write a speech for him? What’s going on? I think they need to
bring me in to help. It’s that bad.”
There’s
a term to describe the cowardly practice of blaming Trump’s advisers for
his moral failings in lieu of blaming Trump himself. Not content with having
hedged that way, though, Metaxas eventually deleted his tweet altogether. And I
understand why: One of the strictest taboos on the American right since 2015 is
faulting Trump and/or his deputies for behaving immorally, a form of critique
that’s become entirely left-coded. Any moral indictment of the leader by a
Republican must be framed in terms of power (“what Trump is doing is hurting
the GOP’s electoral chances”), never in terms of righteous disapproval. Metaxas
flouted that taboo and retreated once he realized it.
But the fact that his loyalty to Trump has weakened
enough for him to have flouted it, however briefly, is significant. Ditto for
Scott, Lawler, and Republican Sen. Roger Wicker,
all of whom condemned the Obama video in moral rather than instrumental terms.
(So did Republican Sen. Katie Britt, sort of, although her use of the
passive voice isn’t a profile in courage.) And ditto for the self-professed
Trump voter who called into
C-SPAN today and condemned the president for the Obama clip in such
scathing moral terms that a clip of it has gone viral on social media.
This is not how the Republican Party has operated for the
past 11 years. Is this how it’s going to operate over the next three?
Wishful thinking.
Well, sure. More so than it has in the past, at least.
How could it not?
The president is term-limited (in theory), unpopular, and
capable at any moment of foisting some needless new political liability on his
party, as we saw this morning. Burdened with his baggage, Beltway Republicans
increasingly fear that the Senate is
in play this fall, not just the House. Incumbents in the party who
typically worry about not being seen as Trumpy enough in a primary suddenly
need to worry about being seen as too Trumpy in a general election, as Tim
Scott and Mike Lawler would tell you. They need “distance” from him.
There are other signs his grip on the party has slipped
lately. After the president called on Congress this week to “nationalize”
the midterm elections, various Senate Republicans quickly
shot
down the
idea. Nor is his base as willing to champion his passion projects as it
used to be: Despite straining to convince Americans that annexing Greenland by
any means necessary was an urgent national priority, Trump managed to persuade only
23 percent of Republicans to support taking the island by force.
We as a people are destined to suffer many more
indignities of an “Obamas as apes” magnitude over the rest of his term. A party
that’s already begun thinking about its future after Trump will have less
reason to defend them.
On the other hand: Is all of this (or most of it) just
wishful thinking? There’s precious little evidence since 2015 that the GOP has
faced, or will face, serious political jeopardy from voters over Trump’s
race-baiting if Republicans don’t push back aggressively against it.
The White House has spent the past year signaling its preference
for a
whiter, and more
white-centric,
America
in every way it can think of, yet I’m unaware of any sharp reaction to it—even
in polling of black voters. Some data shows black support for Trump basically
flat over the previous 12 months; other data suggests he has
declined among that group but largely due to the economy, the same issue
that’s deflated his numbers among practically every other demographic.
He became a right-wing folk hero before his first run for
president by accusing Barack Obama of being secretly African by birth. Fifteen
years later, as his immigration goon squad runs roughshod over Minneapolis in
pursuit of “low-IQ”
Somali immigrants, he’s mocking the Obamas as apes. Having been inured to
this crapola for so long, how could most Americans not be numb to it by
now? To borrow a finance term, racism was long ago fully priced into Trump’s
political stock.
So when Tim Scott et al. denounce it, they’re probably
not trying to preempt a backlash that almost certainly isn’t coming. They’re
acting out of a healthy but increasingly antiquated Pavlovian instinct: When
you see racism that remarkably blatant (even by Trump’s standards!),
from someone that remarkably powerful, you have a moral duty to
challenge it. I’m glad they did.
Appreciate it while you can, though. Your children and
grandchildren, and thus the political class that serves them, might feel
differently.
