Despite the historic beating Republicans took during the midterms, and much to the dismay of some White House staff, President Donald Trump has kept his focus on what truly matters to him: overlaying the nation’s capital with his overly ornate aesthetic. To that end, Trump signed a proclamation Friday naming the Oval Office a national monument. With it, he seeks to forbid future presidents from following him as project-manager-in-chief.
President Barack Obama mocked Trump’s heavily gilded makeover of the Oval Office last month when he said it looks “like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Even before that jab and the overwrought response from conservatives, Democrats had discussed undoing the changes Trump has made at the White House. The incoming Democratic majority may choose to halt some of Trump’s construction projects, including the giant ballroom rising where the East Wing once stood.
Trump’s executive order proclamation acknowledges that the White House and its grounds are already recognized as a National Historic Landmark but gives the Oval Office — and Cabinet Room — a special carveout. The National Park Service will now require “documentation, review, and consideration of alternatives before any action that would substantially alter or demolish the monument or its essential architectural elements.”
Trump seems not to have considered that the Democrats taking office soon will likely happily sign off on any efforts to undo to his gold-plated gussying.
As he signed the proclamation, Trump weirdly claimed he would require help from Congress to make it stick. “We’re going to be declaring it a national monument, and we’re going to send it over to Congress, have it ratified,” Trump told reporters. “If they want to say, ‘Let’s not have oval anymore, let’s make it square,’ what happens is they have to go back to Congress and hopefully the Congress, the people in Congress, will be smart enough not to let that happen.”
There’s a lot to unpack in Trump’s statement. The proclamation doesn’t mention Congress but relies on the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows a president to create a national monument on federal land by proclamation without congressional input. Though there are lawyers who say the statute doesn’t let a subsequent president revoke or diminish a previously established monument without Congress, that’s not what Trump’s DOJ has said. When the Trump administration was looking to undo monuments created by President Joe Biden, it argued tersely that the Antiquities Act that gives presidents the “power to declare carries with it the power to revoke.”
Trump calling on Congress to protect his tacky alterations is inconsistent with his administration’s stance on executive authority. He has steadfastly refused to let Congress tie his hands on most matters. His proclamation is a blatant attempt to keep future presidents from doing what he himself is doing.
Even if Congress did need to get involved, Trump seems not to have considered that the Democrats taking office soon will likely happily sign off on any efforts to undo to his gold-plated gussying.
The executive order is quite a display of tunnel vision from a president whacked by voters who had every reason to believe he only cares about his own interests and not theirs. The day before the midterm elections, he held a news conference boasting about his renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The day after the election, he signed the final beam in the White House ballroom alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Burgum, whose department will now oversee changes to the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, called Trump “the builder in chief” and “the greatest builder that has ever been president of the United States,” the latter of which feels like New Deal construction erasure.
Friday’s spectacle felt like the White House staff placating a toddler on the verge of a tantrum.
Graciously, the proclamation acknowledges that future presidents can restyle the Oval Office with no consequences: “Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to restrict the President’s authority to redecorate the monument, select furnishings, or make ordinary operational and security modifications that do not substantially impair the monument’s historic structure or architectural character.” In other words, if whomever is sworn in January 2029 wants to get rid of the tacky wall sconces and swap out the gold curtains, then they can.
Friday’s spectacle felt like the White House staff placating a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. The document has no real impact on anything, but if it makes Trump feel better to sign a piece of paper, then hand one to him.
Consider that a staffer took the time to write this proclamation, newly installed White House chief of staff Stephen Miller likely reviewed it, a communications aide drafted a fact sheet and a staff secretary scheduled a signing. It’s an incredible use of resources on exactly the kind of nonsense that has left the GOP rudderless but provided Trump a degree of escapism when he’s supposed to be working for the people.
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On Nov. 9, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to wonder how the polls could have been so wrong. “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” the president wrote. “How could the Polls be so wrong???” The same day, Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate in Mississippi’s still-uncalled Senate race, complained that political prognosticators who called the contest safely Republican made it “much more difficult to fundraise and are part of the reason the South has been neglected for so long.”
Is this narrative of a massive polling and forecasting miss right?
Expert handicappers whiffed on Mississippi and on other seemingly unlikely Democratic victories in the House. But most pollsters performed in line with historical expectations. The president’s advisers may have been showing him surveys from right-leaning outfits that performed well in the 2024 presidential race. Those did worse than others this year.
How the polls did
I used our historical polling database at FiftyPlusOne to select every public poll released in the final three weeks of the campaign for House, Senate and governor races, plus the national generic ballot — 373 polls of 88 contests in all. I then compared them to the results of the midterm elections as of 7:04 a.m. EST on Nov. 10. On average this year, the polls underestimated support for Democrats across races by 3.4 points.
That’s worse than a typical year. Since 1998, the polls in an average cycle have missed by about 2.8 points in one direction or the other. But misses tend to come in two sizes: In half of those cycles, the polls missed by a point or less. This year’s miss is the fourth-largest of the 15, behind 2020 (6.3 points in Republicans’ favor), 1998 (3.8 points in Democrats’ favor, also in a midterm) and 2016. That puts the polls on par with their performance in 2012, 2014 and 2024. The miss was also even across offices: House, Senate and governor polls each underestimated Democrats by about 3.3 points.
So why were so many election watchers so surprised at the polling error last week? One explanation is that they were caught off guard by the direction of the miss, as the polls have recently tended to underestimate Republicans, not Democrats. That’s fair psychologically, if not statistically. The final average of generic-ballot polls had Democrats up 9 points nationally, and on current counts they’re winning the national House vote by about 13 points. If that holds, it would be the largest underestimate of Democrats on the generic ballot since 1986.
It’s looking more like the secret sauce these pollsters were adding to their surveys to make them look accurate was just pro-Republican bias.
Another is that Democrats are winning in places that would have been shocking just two years ago. Colom’s race in Mississippi is a good example. The only public poll of Mississippi’s Senate race in the final three weeks, from Change Research on Oct. 21-22, had him trailing Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith 43% to 40%, with another candidate, Ty Pinkins, at 6%. With nearly all the vote counted, Colom is narrowly ahead, making for a roughly 4-point error (some of which may be Pinkins’ voters breaking for Colom late). But … come on, Mississippi? A Democrat winning? That is unthinkable from the vantage point of 2024.
The ‘bad pollsters’ were the usual suspects
A narrower explanation for Trump’s shock is that he was looking at the wrong pollsters. The firms that missed worst this year were the ones that usually lean Republican and get shared on GOP-leaning social media, including the president’s service, Truth Social.
Consider the polls in Texas. Seventeen pollsters surveyed the Senate race in the final three weeks, and their average had Democrat James Talarico up about 3 points over Republican Ken Paxton. As of Tuesday, Talarico was winning by about 12 points. That 9-point error is quite large, even considering a neutral selection of the pollsters.
For instance, polls from the Trafalgar Group — led by Rob Cahaly, a frequent guest of right-leaningcable networks who has worked with GOP campaigns in the past — leaned 3.6 points toward Republicans this year, compared with other pollsters in the same races. Also compared with other polls in the same races from 2016 to 2024, Trafalgar leaned Republican by 3.8 points. InsiderAdvantage leaned 2.1 points to the right this year and 1.5 points historically. Surveys from co/efficient and Echelon Insights, two prominent Republican campaign pollsters, also understated support for Democrats (in Echelon’s case, by a little less).
In 2024 other pollsters underestimated Republicans by about 3 points in the races Trafalgar and InsiderAdvantage surveyed. Trafalgar’s polls missed by just 0.3 and InsiderAdvantage’s by 0.6. Quantus, which polled the presidential race, was off by an average of 0.2 points in the races it surveyed, while other pollsters in those races underestimated Trump by 2.4. This made these firms look like geniuses.
However, with a new election under their belt, it’s looking more like the secret sauce these pollsters were adding to their surveys to make them look accurate was just pro-Republican bias. That works when all the other polls understate support for Republicans, but adds even more error to your surveys when Democrats are the ones being underestimated.
To be clear, it’s not like the nonpartisan pollsters had a good year, either. Polls from neutral and highly respected outfits, such as The New York Times/Siena University, YouGov and Marist University, all underestimated Democrats too. They just understated them by less than the historically GOP-leaning pollsters.
The wrong lesson from past misses
After the polls underestimated Republicans in 2016, 2020 and 2024, the conventional wisdom hardened into a rule that polls are biased against the GOP. Firms that leaned right, meanwhile, got credit for “getting it right.” In August, Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, wrote a widely shared analysis noting that Senate polls had overestimated Democrats “for four cycles in a row,” and he pointed to summer polls showing Democrats ahead in Ohio, Texas and Alaska as the same pattern playing out again. From this, many poll watchers concluded that polls would overstate Democrats again.
This turned out to be a fatally flawed assumption. Anyone who adjusted their analyses in favor of Republicans, whether by trusting the right-leaning firms or by assuming another GOP miss, ended up further from the result than the plain averages. Forecasters rated Mississippi’s Senate race “safe Republican,” as Colom pointed out, even though the only late poll had it within 3 points.
The day before the election, we warned at FiftyPlusOne that you can’t tell in advance which way the polling miss will go. Since 1998 there has been almost no relationship between one cycle’s polling error and the next. (Statistically speaking, there is even a slight negative correlation between cycles; when polls overshoot Democrats in one year, they tend to undershoot them the next.)
So one lesson from 2026 is that analysts should not push poll numbers toward Democrats in 2028, any more than analysts should have pushed them toward Republicans in October. Expect the polls to miss by a few points, and don’t assume you know the direction.
The other lesson is to not overindex on recent apparent wins by individual firms. It is possible for firms to get lucky for a few cycles in a row just because other pollsters happen to be off, or because their methods work in one environment and not another. You should judge pollsters on their record over many elections rather than on whether they leaned the right way once.
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Paul Boakye was 22 when he was diagnosed with HIV. It was winter 1986, five years after the world first became aware of the deadly disease that would become known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). After receiving the news, Boakye was certain he was going to die young. “I distinctly remember a doctor telling me that I probably wouldn’t live to see 30,” he said.
Years passed, and Boakye watched as both his former partner and many of his friends died of complications from HIV, which infiltrates immune cells and weakens the body’s defenses. During the early days of the HIV pandemic, a diagnosis was essentially a death sentence. Without getting treatment, HIV infections can eventually develop into AIDS — the stage in which a person’s immune system has deteriorated to the point that they become vulnerable to typically harmless infections and rare cancers. Once AIDS manifests, life expectancy drops to just a few years.
But Boakye was an exception.
Now four decades after his diagnosis, at age 63, he remains symptom-free. He is one of the rare people with HIV whose immune systems can fight off the virus without treatment. These individuals, known as “elite controllers,” make up less than 0.5 percent of those who get infected with HIV.
For many scientists, this group of people provides a roadmap for a so-called functional cure, a state akin to cancer remission, where the infection is under control, but not completely eliminated.
A cure for HIV is still much needed. In 2025, approximately 1.2 million people around the globe became newly infected and around 570,000 died from HIV-related causes. Today’s clinicians now have an arsenal of effective medications to both prevent and treat HIV infections. “There are a lot of tools to fight HIV, but it’s also evident that this is not enough,” said Asier Saez-Cirion, leader of the Viral Reservoirs and Immune Control Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
To keep HIV as a survivable disease, people with the virus must take treatments for life, which brings up widespread issues of cost and access. When those become a barrier, it ends up costing lives. But researchers have been working on deciphering the lasting secrets of elite controllers like Boakye, in hopes of one day developing a functional cure for millions more people living with HIV. This work has led to many new strategies for fighting the virus — and several new treatments are now being evaluated in clinical trials.
The elite controllers of HIV
Joel Blankson, an associate professor of medicine specializing in infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, remembers when he encountered an HIV elite controller for the first time. It was 1998, and a woman had come to the clinic after testing positive for HIV. That test result showed that her immune system had encountered the virus and produced antibodies to fight it.
But further tests revealed something baffling. Normally, as an HIV infection progresses, the virus infiltrates key immune cells, known as CD4 T cells, hijacking their internal machinery to make more copies of itself, and killing the host cells in the process. This patient, however, had no detectable levels of virus in her blood and appeared to have a healthy number of CD4 T cells. “That was fascinating,” Blankson said, since clinicians at the time did not think that could be possible.
Starting in the 1990s, researchers in the US and elsewhere in the world started documenting such cases. A few years earlier, Bruce Walker, a physician-scientist and director of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, had been similarly astounded by a patient who had been HIV positive for 16 years with no signs of disease. “I thought initially he couldn’t possibly be infected because everybody we saw had progressive illness,” Walker said.
For any virus, whether it’s HIV or influenza or Covid-19, people have a range of responses — some people become severely ill while others may have no symptoms at all. But HIV is exceptionally good at evading the immune system’s defenses, so the research community was glad to see that there were some people who seemed to be able to naturally fight off HIV. “It was particularly exciting to see that they were able to maintain this control in the long term,” Saez-Cirion said.
So the natural question was: What made these people different from those who became severely ill from HIV?
Some researchers hypothesized that these elite controllers had been infected by a defective version of HIV. Early evidence appeared to support this claim: In 1992, researchers described a small group of long-term, symptom-free HIV-positive individuals who had all been inadvertently infected through blood transfusions from an asymptomatic individual. The transfusions had occurred in 1985, before blood was routinely screened for HIV. Both the donor and the recipients harbored a strain of the virus with genetic mutations that hindered its ability to replicate.
But this incident turned out to be the exception. Later studies found that most people who survived for many years without disease progression did not carry weakened versions of HIV. For example, when Blankson and his colleagues isolated HIV from elite controllers’ cells, they found that the virus was able to multiply effectively in a lab dish just as well as the virus from people who became ill from HIV. And when they used the virus from these elite controllers to infect mice engineered to have human-like immune systems, the pathogen was still able to spread through the animals with ease. All of this suggested there was something unique not about the infecting strain of the virus but instead about these individuals’ immune systems.
As the tests for detecting the virus in blood samples improved, researchers found that there were even different levels of how much some people could control the virus. There were, for example, “viremic controllers,” who are often defined as those with less than 2,000 copies of HIV within a milliliter of blood, and “elite controllers” who have less than 50. For comparison, a typical HIV-positive person can have anywhere from tens of thousands to more than 1 million HIV particles in a milliliter of blood, depending on the stage of their infection.
More recently, another group of intriguing patients has emerged: post-treatment controllers, who, after taking antiretroviral treatment for many years, become capable of controlling HIV without medication..This group is giving even more hope that controllers may hold a clue to finally creating a lasting cure for the disease.
Unraveling the mechanisms of elite control
Once people who seemed to be beating back HIV on their own began to emerge, researchers went searching for more of them. Eventually, several research teams were able to assemble large cohorts of these patients: Walker and his colleagues, for instance, found around 1,000 elite controllers to begin to study them en masse to search for trends.
Some of the earliest studies looked into elite controllers’ genetics. Using a technique known as genome-wide association, which involves screening the genetic material of many people for links to disease, scientists discovered that a large proportion of elite controllers possessed variants of genes that code for structures responsible for presenting antigens — the fragments of viruses and other substances that immune cells use to detect pathogens.
Researchers have drawn inspiration from these studies to develop new strategies for fighting HIV.
This led scientists to zero in on cytotoxic T cells, immune cells that zero in on these fragments to identify foreign and infected cells to attack. In elite controllers, these cellular soldiers appeared to be exceptionally good at seeking out and eliminating HIV. How these individuals’ immune responses accomplish this has been a matter of intense investigation: Some researchers, such as Mark Connors, an HIV researcher at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his team have found that elite controllers’ cytotoxic T cells increase the production of a specific molecule that pokes holes in infected immune cells to kill them — something that the same type of cells in other HIV-positive people are unable to do. Other groups, such as Walker’s team, have found that cytotoxic T cells are able to launch highly specific attacks on vulnerable regions within the virus’s structure.
Over the years, scientists have found that there is likely no one-size-fits-all explanation for why elite controllers’ immune systems are such formidable opponents for HIV. Studies have also found that these individuals also appear to possess exceptionally robust natural killer cells, which are immune foot soldiers that are some of the first to find and kill invading pathogens.
Other investigations have looked beyond specific cells to the aftermath of an elite controllers’ immune response. Xu Yu, an HIV researcher at the Ragon Institute, along with Walker and their colleagues, have found that immune systems of some elite controllers keep HIV locked away in so-called gene deserts, where it is unable to make more copies of itself — an essential task for the virus’ success.
Yu says that this is likely the result of unusually strong immune surveillance. Elite controllers’ immune systems were likely able to kill off the cells in which the virus had integrated itself into parts of the genome to multiply. This left only those cells with ineffective viruses behind. How the immune system actually does this remains a mystery, but according to Yu, it’s likely that multiple parts of controllers’ immune systems work together to launch particularly powerful responses.
In addition to uncovering how, exactly, the immune system accomplishes this feat, Yu is also hoping to replicate this process in people who aren’t elite controllers. The good news is, evidence so far suggests that this may indeed be possible: In a 2023 study with eight people who had been on long-term anti-retroviral therapy, Yu’s team found that it was also possible for non-elite controllers to lock HIV away in these gene deserts — but only after more than two decades of treatment.
The next step is to determine how to make people reach this state faster, so that they can one day stop needing treatment altogether, Yu says.
Researchers have drawn inspiration from these studies to develop new strategies for fighting HIV. Several are currently being tested in people with the virus. Walker’s team, for example, has developed a trial vaccine designed to train a person’s T cells to attack the most vulnerable parts the viruses’ structure — both as a way of preventing and of treating infection, in an early-stage trial. Saez-Cirion and his team have several ongoing trials, including one effort that involves administering immunotherapy in combination with antiretrovirals in people with newly diagnosed infection to try to coax their immune systems into developing the potent immune response found in elite controllers.
The elite road to a cure?
Experts are generally reluctant to say that elite controllers — even those who have lived symptom-free for decades — are “cured” of HIV. The main reason is that HIV is notorious for hiding in so-called reservoirs, cells in which HIV lingers without replicating.
The virus in these reservoirs escapes detection from a person’s immune system and from current HIV medicines. From here, it can then become active after remaining quiet for years. Because HIV infects immune cells, which travel all around the body, the virus can hide in deep tissues, such as the brain, that are extremely difficult to probe in living people.
And there are documented cases of the virus eventually breaking through an elite or viremic controller’s immune defenses, kick-starting disease progression — even if they have lived symptom-free for years or decades. It’s still unclear what factors determine when that point will come. So, many controllers are also on antiretroviral therapy.
There are, however, two elite controllers who are widely considered to be cured. One is the “Esperanza patient,” named after the Argentinian city where she lived, for whom researchers analyzed more than a billion cells and found no intact HIV. And the other, Loreen Willenburg, a Californian woman, kept the virus at bay for more than three decades without treatment — even while receiving immune-suppressing treatment for lung and brain cancer. Before she died in April, Willenburg donated her body to science; Yu and her colleagues have been carefully analyzing autopsy samples to determine whether there are intact viruses hidden somewhere within her body.
But these are the incredibly rare known examples among the 92 million people who have acquired HIV since the virus was first described. So even the elite controllers must stay vigilant for the virus’s reemergence. Boakye regularly gets his bloodscreened to make sure that HIV has not begun to spread. Today, he lives in the UK working as a playwright, and he remains active and healthy — and HIV remains undetectable in routine tests, even after four decades without treatment.
For years, he has tried to enroll in a study in hopes of helping scientists understand how his immune system has managed to fight HIV all these years, and last year, he became involved in three research projects. One of these is at the Ragon Institute, where Yu’s team analyzed more than 1 million cells in Boakye’s blood and found only a tiny number of HIV fragments — and only one that appears to be intact. Whether this fragment is capable of replicating remains unknown.
“They believe that my immune system is ignoring all the defective fragments and just controlling the one fragment that could replicate,” Boakye said. How his immune system does this is still a mystery, but Boakye hopes that by studying him and other elite controllers, scientists will be able to reverse engineer new treatments.
While a cure for HIV remains elusive, this research is bringing us closer than ever to that goal. There are multiple trials trying to mimic the responses found in elite controllers around the world, and the results of these efforts will emerge over the next five years or so, which is quite an exciting prospect, Saez-Cirion said. “We need additional tools that will allow people to live with HIV but without antiretrovirals. And if we can cure it — even better,” Saez-Cirion said.
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