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THE BIG IDEA: The buck does not stop here.
Donald Trump declared
after meeting Kim Jong Un last week that he trusts the North Korean leader
and believes he will give up his nuclear weapons program. “I may be wrong,” the
president said during a news
conference in Singapore. “I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I
was wrong.’” Then he paused and corrected himself. “I don’t know that I’ll ever
admit that,” Trump clarified, “but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”
Trump’s aside may have
been in jest, but it is also one of the more self-aware statements he's made
during 17 months in power. Time and time again, the president has sought to
shift the blame for his own decisions and their consequences to his political
opponents. He’s doing it again this week by falsely blaming
Democrats for his own policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their
parents at the border, which he could stop with one phone call.
“Immigration … and all of
the problems that we’re having … I say it’s very strongly the Democrats’
fault,” Trump said defiantly at the White
House on Monday, even as every Senate Democrat formally signed onto a bill that
would overturn his unpopular policy.
The president added on Twitter: “Why don’t the
Democrats give us the votes to fix the world’s worst immigration laws? … It is
the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and
Crime.”
In fact, the separations
are the result of the "zero tolerance" approach announced by
Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month to prosecute all adults who cross the
border illegally. Once they're detained, their children are declared
unaccompanied minors and handed over to the Department of Health and Human
Services.
Republicans also control
both chambers of Congress, of course, and the failure to pass legislation –
which really is a separate issue from Trump’s executive decision to break up
families – is the result of intra-GOP divisions
over how welcoming the United States should be to immigrants.
During the 2016
Republican convention, Trump famously declared: “I alone can fix it.”
Defending the president’s
family separation policy on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen
Nielsen insisted: “Congress alone can fix it.”
-- Many Republican lawmakers were uncharacteristically willing
to go on the record to call Trump and Nielsen disingenuous:
· “The
administration’s decision to separate families is a new, discretionary choice,”
said Sen. Ben Sasse
(R-Neb.). “Anyone saying that their hands are tied or that the only conceivable
way to fix the problem … is to rip families apart is flat wrong.”
· “To
blame previous administrations for a wrong committed today is not acceptable,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski
(R-Alaska).
· “The
White House can fix it if they want to,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). “I
don’t think there’s any question about that.”
-- This is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpism:
Trump chose to end the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he then falsely blamed
Congress generally and Democrats specifically for putting the “dreamers” at
risk of deportation.
The president even tried
to point the finger at
Democrats for not passing tougher gun laws after the shooting in Parkland, Fla.
Trump also blamed
Democrats when Republicans could not unify to repeal Obamacare, even though
they didn’t need a single Democratic vote to do so. “We'll let Obamacare fail,”
the president told reporters at the
White House last summer. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own
it.”
Since then, Trump has
methodically gone about disemboweling the law –
by repealing the individual mandate, discontinuing the cost-sharing reduction
payments and ordering the Justice Department to stop defending in court the
law’s requirement that insurance plans cover preexisting conditions. Premiums
are expected to spike again this year, but Trump has said explicitly he
deserves no blame for destabilizing the system. “Any increase in ObamaCare
premiums is the fault of the Democrats for giving us a ‘product’ that never had
a chance of working,” he tweeted.
When it looked like the
tax cuts might not pass last October, Trump declared
matter-of-factly during a Cabinet meeting: “I'm not going to blame myself, I'll
be honest.”
When a federal judge
blocked Trump’s first travel ban last year, the president suggested that the
Republican appointee would be to blame if there was a terrorist attack on U.S.
soil. “If something happens blame him and court system,” he tweeted.
When Navy SEAL Ryan Owens
was killed during a botched covert mission in Yemen last year, Trump did not
just resist accepting responsibility for authorizing the operation. He blamed the generals.
“They came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals,
who are very respected,” Trump said on Fox News. “And they lost Ryan.”
Trump has claimed credit when the
stock market goes up, and aides have said he does not bear responsibility
when it goes down.
Asked in 2016 about
whether his overheated rhetoric was to blame for physical clashes and violence
at his rallies, Trump replied: “I don’t accept
responsibility.”
-- Harry Truman kept a
plaque on his desk in the Oval Office that said: “The buck stops here.” In
contrast, Trump appears to see taking responsibility as showing weakness. To be
sure, every president tries to deflect blame to some degree – though many have
also been willing to take responsibility when they blow it. As John Kennedy
quipped after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, "Victory has a thousand
fathers, but defeat is an orphan."
“President Obama, by his
own admission, failed badly during the rollout of Obamacare in fall 2013, more
grievously due to the failures of HealthCare.gov,” Vox noted last October.
“But he took responsibility and fixed it, launching an unprecedented number of
outside programmers and tech specialists to overhaul the site and get it in
working order. ‘I take full responsibility for making sure it gets fixed ASAP,’
Obama said at the time. And so he did…
“Here are a few other
things Obama took responsibility for while in office: The failed Tom Daschle
and Bill Richardson Cabinet nominations in 2009. The BP oil spill in 2010.
Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives in 2010. The attack on the US
Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. The VA scandal in 2014. Democratic
losses in the 2014 midterms. The death of two hostages in an operation against
al-Qaeda in 2015. The Syrian government’s atrocities in Aleppo in 2016.”
-- Right up until he became president, Trump talked a big game
about leaders needing to take responsibility for their own decisions. Here
are some of the many tweets in this vein from before he took office:
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