Day 203: Donald Trump: The Buck Passer
Harry Truman famously kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said, “The buck stops here.” He knew that presidential decisions had consequences, and as the leader of the nation, he was ultimately responsible for the good and the bad that came with those decisions.
Donald Trump doesn’t quite see it that way. In the last 24 hours, he has tried to simultaneously blame Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for problems while taking credit for an economic resurgence eight years in the making.
Trump retweeted these two messages just moments apart.
Look at the graph in the Bloomberg tweet. The spike begins in 2009 and it’s hard to tell what Trump is bragging about. That blip after 2016? Great, congrats. The “record” that they’re citing has also been hit more than a dozen times since 2009. (Also, it’s important to remember that the U.S.’s fiscal year ends in September, which means the U.S. is still working under the budget signed by Obama. To top it off, Trump is yet to sign even a single economic bill of any real significance.)
Publicly feuding with his own political teammate, and the most powerful member of the Senate, is an embarrassing and counterproductive look.
While, yes, McConnell couldn’t get it done, a significant part of the blame is on Trump too. Presidential legislative agenda is very real, and when a commander-in-chief wants to get something done, especially when their party holds power in Congress, it’s usually very done. But for the repeal and replace effort, Trump couldn’t help his own cause. He didn’t seem to understand the very basic mechanisms of any bill the GOP forwarded, much less how health insurance works. He never made the public case for why the bill was so vital, just that it was.
Conversely, for example, when the Affordable Care Act was going through its legislative machinations, Obama exerted tremendous pressure on Democrats to get it passed. He rallied around the nation explaining exactly why it was going to help so many Americans. Ultimately, he was successful. Had it failed, some of that would have fallen on then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), but ultimately, the buck stops in the Oval Office. After all, they’re not calling the bill Pelosicare or Reidcare today.
Perhaps seeing his continually-lagging approval numbers, Trump is now retweeting Twitter polls that show him in a positive light from an account that recently asked whether “Seth Rich was murdered by the DNC / Clintons?” and got an even distribution.
Are presidents more likely to succeed or fail based on the situations they inherit? Of course. But blaming predecessors after an election is simply not done. Obama was elected in the midst of the worst economic recession in nearly a century. Post-election, Obama never once publicly blamed George W. Bush for the predicament. He was now sitting at the Resolute Desk.
The buck stopped there.
But Trump has always been a blame-shifter and a take-credit-for-others’-work kind of guy. When things go south he’ll proclaim it fake news, or a witch hunt, or fire someone on his staff. When positive news rolls in, he yells MAGA like a broken robot and gets his echo chamber to do the same.
The buck keeps going.
203 days in, 1259 to go
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