Dog Bites Man

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.