It Was the Other Guys Who Screwed Up – the Guiding Principle of Trump Governance
Confronted by a reporter with actual indisputable facts contravening Donald Trump’s boast about his massive electoral college victory, Trump replied “I was given this information.” Sure, and two months after the election he still had not bothered to confirm that which he had been “given“—which was no more complicated than comparing three or four numbers.
Whether this kind of prevarication is a deliberate lie, or evidence of Trump’s lack of curiosity as to facts, is not exactly clear. But whichever it is, the man’s instinct is immediately to shrug off responsibility. Something goes wrong, it is someone else’s fault.
Likewise, concerning the death of Ryan Owens in the botched raid in Yemen, he assigned the responsibility for Owens’s death to the generals: “They lost Ryan.” Moreover, he made a point that the operation had been planned during the “totally disastrous” Obama presidency—no matter that Obama had rejected carrying it out, it had to be something Trump was not responsible for. Two times over.
Of course, his attribution of the loss of the popular vote in the election to fraud on an unprecedented scale—for which not a shred of proof has been adduced—belongs to the same pattern.
Past is Prologue: Congress is the Next “They”
We can see where Trump’s shedding responsibility is headed in the legislative arena, in particular in regard to the allegedly “disastrous” Affordable Care Act. Trump has vowed to replace the ACA with a “great” plan that will be both cheaper and more comprehensive—”everybody will be covered.”
Whom Is He Trying to Kid? The overall cost of health care has been steadily on the rise for decades and in the long run no legislative shell game is going to stop it—unless there’s a huge shift toward preventive care, promoted within the ACA but which is not addressed by anything the Republicans have ever proposed (it’s part of their “individual responsibility” mantra). Medical advances have a price tag—the greater price the more technologically sophisticated they become—and who is going to reject medical advances?
If you’re going to cover everyone you will have to include the people with grave and/or chronic illness who cannot afford high premiums—exactly those whom the insurance industry wants to exclude. Leaving them out of coverage will be the consequence of leaving the field to “Market Forces”—the forces whom conservatives invoke as infallible gods when it comes to financial polices.
[Update to this post as of March 14, the Republicans have unveiled a plan that conspicuously fails to deliver what Trump promised, cheap health care for everybody. Given the chance, Trump will sign it without understanding it—probably without reading more than a few pages—and the consequences will be postponed so he can get away with it for a few years. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the Republican bill will cause millions to lose health insurance.]
Therefore, when the new health care plan eventually evolves to the deep disappointment of the many who have swallowed Trump’s extravagant claims, you can only expect that it will be, in the Trumpian view, Congress’s fault. “They” will have betrayed the American people—”they” will have put the president in a situation in which he had no choice. He can plead that Congress was in charge of legislation, so that he had to defer to their judgment, and bad consequences were out of his hands. He might even plead ignorance as to what the legislation actually did, and that wouldn’t be surprising given his inattention to matters that require more than three minutes of consecutive thought.
The Most Dismaying Irony Is. . .
This guy whose leadership credentials have been based on his so-called success as a businessman (yet to be established since he will not release his tax returns) has no sense of the arc of history or his responsibilities as the leader of the U.S,. much less of the world’s most powerful nation. The White House is a hotbed of infighting because, in spite of all of his ranting, fuming, and embracing of outlandish conspiracies, he has no firm hand to set a course and stick to it. When push comes to shove, with Trump everything comes down to the personal, and with him “personal” means that if you fail to flatter or genuflect to him, nothing you can say, truth or fiction, will be heard or acted upon, except in retaliation. Some observers call this “transactional” (the new buzz word of the punditry). Some call it bullying.
And whatever happens will be somebody else’s fault.