TRUMP, ANOTHER HAIR-ON-FIRE UPROAR, AND THE MIDTERMS. On Friday, the political and media world experienced a nervous breakdown over President Donald Trump’s posting of a video that contained a racist image portraying former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. The video contained a lot more — with a jungle theme, it portrayed former President Joe Biden as a gorilla eating a banana, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a hyena, and former first lady Hillary Clinton as a warthog, while portraying Trump as a lion, the king of the jungle. But it didn’t matter. There is a long history of racist tropes portraying black people as apes, and that is what the video did with the Obamas.
Trump took the video down and explained that he had not intentionally posted it, that it had briefly autoplayed after the video he intended to post, which was about the 2020 election. But at minimum, the damage done meant the loss of one, two, three or more days that might have been devoted to making the case for Republicans in the midterm elections, now less than nine months away.
In fact, on the day Trump posted the video, he held a White House event introducing the new TrumpRx program, which the administration bills as “a transformative new government platform that gives Americans direct access to dramatically lower prices on dozens of common, high-cost brand-name prescription drugs.” Targeting Americans with prescription costs not fully covered by insurance, the program has the admirable goal of pushing down the prices of drugs, rather than the common Democratic fix of offering taxpayer-paid subsidies for people to pay rising costs, thus ensuring that costs will rise even higher.
It’s hard to imagine an issue more suited to midterm campaigning, and Trump will certainly feature it on the stump in coming months. But the rollout was lost amid days of controversy over the video.
It was one small missed opportunity at a time when the White House needs to make the best use of its opportunities. Yes, a million things can happen before the midterms, especially in the Age of Trump, when it seems like a million things happen every day. Still, it’s reasonable to say that right now things do not look good for Republicans and the GOP president.
Start by looking at the 2018 midterms in Trump’s first administration. Republicans lost big in those elections — Democrats won a net 40 seats and control of the House. Republicans actually picked up two seats in the Senate to keep control there, which was important for Trump’s ability to confirm his nominees. But losing 40 seats in the House ended whatever legislative agenda Trump might have had. It also ensured that majority Democrats would impeach him — twice, as it turned out.
Go back and look at the so-called generic ballot question — “If the House election were held today, would you vote for the Republican Party candidate or the Democratic Party candidate?” On this date, Feb. 8, in 2018, the RealClearPolitics average of polls on the generic ballot had Democrats at 44.6% and Republicans at 38.4% — a 6.2 percentage point lead for Democrats.
The Democratic lead remained in place for the next nine months. It was about 7 points on Election Day, when House Democrats picked up those 40 seats.
Now look at today’s generic ballot. In the RealClearPolitics average, Democrats are at 47.7% and Republicans are at 42.5% — a 5.2 percentage point lead for Democrats. And Democrats have led in generic ballot polling since early March 2025.
So the Republican deficit today is just a bit short of what it was in 2018, when the GOP lost big in House elections. And of course, Democrats don’t have to pick up 40 seats. If they can gain just five or more seats, they will win control of the House. The Republican margin is astonishingly narrow.
Then there is history. The president’s party usually loses House seats in midterms. Only two presidents in the last 90 years — George W. Bush in 2002 and Bill Clinton in 1998 — have seen their party pick up seats, and both were in unusual circumstances. And then, finally, there is job approval. Trump’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average of polls is 42.3%, which is not terribly concerning for him but well below the kind of approval that will help his party win House seats. An approval rating well below 50% will make winning the midterms harder.
Of course Trump knows all this. He has a plan to defy history and the polls. But messes like the video controversy make the job harder by the day.