President Donald Trump walks at Newark Liberty International Airport as he travels en route to Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, in Newark, New Jersey, August 7, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
President Donald Trump is repeating an "insulting" mistake from numerous past presidential administrations, with one prominent former White House official detailing the electorally deadly error in an interview with Pod Save America.
David Axelrod is a Democratic political consultant who previously worked as a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama during his first term, as well as the chief strategist for both of his presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. On Sunday, he appeared in an interview with Pod Save America host Jon Favreau, another Obama administration official whom he worked with closely.
While discussing the current state of the 2026 midterms with a few weeks left until Election Day, Favreau suggested that, given the toxic political climate for Trump and the GOP, if Democrats are not able to notch some wins in red states this year, they might never be able to. Axelrod, in response, suggested that the two of them might be getting "flashbacks" to the 2010 midterm cycle, where Democrats ended up suffering huge losses to Republicans, causing Obama's broader agenda to stall out badly.
Axelrod also suggested that, in his view, Republicans have been taking the same approach they did back in 2010 in the face of an impending midterm backlash.
"I watched the Republicans, and, you know, they're doing what we did, which is to try and rationalize that what is obviously happening isn't going to happen," Axelrod said.
He later expanded on the similarities of their approach, arguing that Trump and the GOP are making the same mistakes that doomed the Obama administration in 2010, and later the Biden administration in the back half of his term.
"This is another important point, and you remember this from when we were at the White House," Axelrod explained. "At the beginning of our administration, we came into office right at the beginning of the Great Recession. We walked into the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, and we thought we were making progress, but people were not feeling that progress, and when we tried to claim progress too overtly, and did not really project empathy and advocacy for people who were struggling in that economy, we were punished for it, and we corrected that."
He continued: "We always pulled that back because we knew that it was insulting to people to try and jawbone them into feeling that the economy was better when their lives were not. Joe Biden made that same mistake, and paid a big price for it. You know, [he] toured the country in the summer of 2023 talking about the wonders of 'Bidenomics,' the worst branding mistake since New Coke. And so what's really unbelievable is that Trump, having benefited from Biden's mistake, is now repeating it."