The News
President Donald Trump is starting his weekend cleaning up a social media post that fellow Republicans called racist, locked in a showdown with Democrats over immigration, and facing growing worries within his party about losing Congress.
The calendar says 2026, but it feels a lot like 2018.
One retiring House Republican told Semafor that Thursday’s Trump post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes validated the choice to leave Capitol Hill. Not long after that, Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei announced his retirement — the second House Republican this week to do so, and the 30th of this election cycle.
“Another reason to increase the intensity of my job search,” an aide to a different House Republican said of the now-deleted Obamas post.
The Trump administration spent Friday in damage control over the video posted to Trump’s Truth Social account as multiple Republicans raced to condemn it, even as the president’s son posted that it “[w]ould be nice if we had more Republicans who didn’t immediately fall for every leftwing media hoax!”
The furor over the post — and perhaps more strikingly, the chaotic backtracking — reflect a new moment for a president who spent a year stomping on norms without evident consequences. Now Trump is headed into a shutdown clash with Democrats over immigration enforcement, an issue at the core of Trump’s political strength before images out of Minneapolis changed some Americans’ minds. Now the president is taking another hit in public, and potentially in the Capitol halls.
Amid swift backlash from some of the president’s closest allies to the Obamas post, the White House sought to distance Trump from the evening post. A person with direct knowledge of the situation told Semafor that Trump “had not seen the video before it got posted.” Trump later said he had seen only the first portion of the video, a conspiracy-type post about voter fraud, before giving it to a staffer who posted without watching it through the end.
Even after its deletion, Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah said it shouldn’t have been “left published for so long.”
Curtis and GOP Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine, were among the senators to condemn the post, joining House Republicans like Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Burgess Owens of Utah, and Don Bacon of Nebraska.
Meanwhile, public opinion has curdled against Trump’s interior immigration enforcement even as Republicans see border security as a huge political strength. There’s already tangible fallout: A Trump-backed state Senate candidate lost over the weekend in a district Trump won by 17 points.
“I don’t think that the timing was in our favor,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, of the special election loss that came after ICE “had the problems that they had” in Minnesota, where federal agents killed two US citizens.
Sessions, a former chair of the House GOP’s campaign arm, tried to contextualize the problem: “Do I think that we’ve turned the corner, and that [Texas is] now a bipartisan state, and there’s a 50-50 chance for people to win? No.”
Yet Republicans have lingering fears that a botched Texas Senate primary could leave their majority in more peril. Losing the Senate would be even more dire for Trump than the House, curbing his ability to get new judges or Cabinet secretaries confirmed.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said this week that “we’ve got to up our game” to give voters a reason to back Republicans. He told Republican senators at a campaign meeting that he’s “very confident that we’ll keep the majority, but we’d like to grow the majority and certainly keep Sen. Cornyn and Texas,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.
Trump has not yet backed Cornyn, the candidate whom Republicans think is best positioned to win there. Cornyn is in a heated primary against state Attorney General Ken Paxton; both parties think a Paxton win would make the seat far more competitive, hurting the party nationally.
“There’s one person in the universe who can make that decision, and it’s him,” Cornyn told Semafor this week. “We’ve made our case to him, but we’ve got the pedal to the metal.”
Could Trump actually endorse Paxton? There’s recent precedent for that: The president is backing Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., against incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.
White House spokesman Kush Desai told Semafor that the administration “remains laser-focused on continuing to deliver for the American people.” The Trump administration has pointed to various examples, like gas prices, GDP growth, and a newly announced health care price initiative as evidence of its efforts for voters.
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Trump’s immigration squeeze will get more acute next week, when he’s slated to negotiate with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over proposed enforcement changes that Democrats are insisting on after the Minnesota deaths.
Democrats say they are willing to vote against funding the Department of Homeland Security — including popular programs like FEMA and the TSA — unless Trump is willing to make major concessions on things like masked federal agents and judicial warrant requirements.
“When working-class people are now basically coming out and chanting anti-ICE statements, it means that Republicans are losing and they should get back to where the mainstream is,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., told Semafor, referring to anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement chants this week at a wrestling event.
Republicans argue Trump has de-escalated since the Minnesota killings and that Democrats’ demands won’t fly. Unless they can reach a deal, DHS would shut down on Feb. 14, even as Trump tells lawmakers he does not want any more shutdowns.
Trump faces more problems than that in Congress. He’s still attempting to kill — or at least get around — the Senate’s 60-vote requirements to pass a voter ID and citizenship verification law on voting, a maneuver that lacks sufficient support in the Senate GOP.
And his elevation of Kevin Warsh to the Federal Reserve is not going well. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., supports Warsh but plans to block his nomination in committee until the Trump administration concludes a criminal probe of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. He said this week that a majority of the panel’s Republicans agree with him, even as some expressed frustration.
“I don’t see [Powell’s conduct] rising to the level of criminal. And so that’s where Tillis and I do agree,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said. “Where we disagree is, I don’t think you hold Warsh’s nomination hostage over that. That’s a disconnect for me.”
Room for Disagreement
For all of Trump’s problems at the moment, he has a credible case to make for his handling of a key swathe of the economy (another area where his approval ratings have flagged in recent weeks).
The Dow Jones Industrial Average broke 50,000 on Friday for the first time ever, a big moment for the president. It’s a sharp turn from the stock swoon last spring that greeted the president’s initial round of tariffs.
“The ‘Experts’ said that if I hit 50,000 on the Dow by the end of my Term, I would have done a great job, but I hit 50,000 today, three years ahead of schedule,” Trump posted on Friday afternoon. “Remember that for the Midterms, because the Democrats will CRASH the Economy!”
shelby, eleanor, and burgess’ view
Trump’s second-term White House tried to avoid the very position it is now in: Controversies of the White House’s own making are distracting from the economy, which is what top officials and GOP leaders badly want to talk about. The steady stream of negative news stories is weighing on lawmakers and Trump allies — and they are speaking up, on everything from Greenland to Powell to Trump’s social media posts.
The White House is trying to shift gears; Trump is talking more about affordability and arranging domestic travel to highlight investments in job creation. But lawmakers and the GOP base might need more than a few domestic visits to quell the concerns.
Notable
- White House aides are “pretty pissed off” at the unnamed individual responsible for posting the now-deleted Truth Social video, Semafor reported.