Washington, DC

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, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott, Eleanor Mueller, and Burgess Everett report.

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.