Is Trump Finally Losing the Blame Game?

How Democrats should handle a president who's motto is "the buck stops anywhere but here"

NB: Trump announced a 90 day tariff pause literally seconds before I hit post. So a few of the tenses in here might be wrong. But the basic point still stands - especially when it comes to not letting Trump off the hook now that he’s desperate for an off ramp.

This post is about the dark art of excuse-making. So I’ll start with one of my own:

I planned to write something Monday night and post it Tuesday at 9am, because that would be three days between newsletter posts (which seems disciplined) and allow me to hit “publish” in morning (which the internet says is a good idea). But then, on Sunday, I discovered that the pipe to our hot-water heat had burst. I’ve spent the past two days pumping water out of the basement, getting to know Jerome the plumber, and renting industrial-strength fans and dehumidifiers from Home Depot.

From this experience, I have drawn three conclusions:

1. There are worse things in life than basement flooding. Still, these days it feels unfair when things go wrong in normal ways. Breakdowns should be either completely unprecedented or precedented. Both at the same time is too much.

2. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested on TV the other day that part of Trump’s plan is to move white-collar workers into blue-collar jobs. Based on Jerome’s reaction to my repeated offers to “help out” over the last two days, nobody will be happy about this transition.

3. Why are the grumpiest guys at Home Depot always in the tool rental department? Is it store policy?

Anyhow, while I was busy trying to fix the basement, Trump was busy trying to break the economy. His tariffs are a completely predictable disaster, a wound as ridiculous and self-inflicted as not replacing your hot-water heater even though you know it’s old and probably will need replacing soon. Which of course is something I’d never do.

I’m not an economics expert, so I’ll leave that to others. What I think is interesting is that - for what might be the first time ever - Trump did something awful and struggled to shift blame.

Trump’s Most Impressive Quality

In 2017, I was in the MSNBC on deck circle (i.e. a couch outside the studio) watching Gay Talese, the legendary non-fiction writer, do an interview. I knew it was the closest I was ever likely to get to Gay Talese, so I paid close attention. And he didn’t disappoint. One of the things he said has stuck with me ever since:

“There’s something very, not admirable, but something impressive about Trump’s ability to listen to nobody and get where he otherwise would not have gotten.”

That distinction - between impressive and admirable - shaped my thinking about Trump. And there is nothing un-admirable Trump does more impressively than passing the buck.

Sometimes, Trump’s ability to avoid blame stems from a level of shamelessness astounding even by political standards. Think of “locker room talk,” after the Access Hollywood tapes, or “witch hunt” during the impeachments and indictments. Other times, he gropes around for a scapegoat until he finds one his base will accept. (When Covid hit, he blamed Democrats, then China.)

Also, Trump somehow realized that Americans were, to a shocking degree, willing to listen to a president complain about how unfair everyone was being to him. Every president is frustrated by the bureaucracy. But one reason no previous president railed against “the deep state” is that saying, “I’m the most powerful person in the world but I can’t figure out how to get things done and also you should feel sorry for me,” never seemed like a winning political message.

Frankly, for anyone other than Trump, it isn’t a winning political message. Other GOP candidates who try to imitate Trump’s whining and blame-shifting have mostly lost, or, if they’re in red states, become way less popular than the president. Why is Trump the only chief executive able to completely ignore the idea that “the buck stops here”? I have no idea. Why is Magneto able to move metal with his mind? Why does Reverse-Flash have super speed?

But tariffs might be different. And there are a few reasons why:

• Trump’s Age. The euphemism Democrats used when talking about Biden was “he’s lost his fastball.” That’s a good way to think about Trump today. A younger Trump, when asked if he could promise his policies wouldn’t cause recession, would have said, “I don’t want a recession, but we’ll probably get one because Biden did such a terrible job.” Instead, he refused to rule out a recession - which meant taking responsibility for one if it occurred.

  Recently, Stephen Miller and a few other Trump advisors have tried blaming Biden. But it’s too late. Their boss made their job way harder because he answered a question in a stubborn, inartful, vaguely hostile way that he would have had the agility to avoid just a few years ago. Biden supporters are familiar with these symptoms.

• Shock and awe. Trump spent his first term claiming to be an outsider foiled at every turn. This time, he is literally referring to himself as “The King.” And the heart of his appeal in the first weeks of his second term is that he’s getting things done. You can argue that the tariffs will lead to prosperity, and his team is trying their best. But unless Trump wants to admit that he’s just a typical lame-duck president - which for temperamental and political reasons he’ll never do - he can’t argue that this crisis is someone else’s fault.

• Trump’s 2024 pitch to people who don’t like him. Trump did something smart on the campaign trial. He didn’t try to argue that he was a good person. He tried to argue that voters shouldn’t care that he was a bad person, because he would make them richer.

  It worked. About a third of Trump voters (or 15% of voters total) said they disliked Trump, and voted for him anyway because they “liked his policies.” But that means Trump - despite being more powerful than ever - also has a lot of soft support. MAGA may stick with him to the bitter end. But the people who put Trump in the White House did so because they believed he would make them richer. Not eventually. Quickly. Now he’s making them poorer instead. Trump’s basically offered a deal to voters, “You overlook the fact that I’m personally terrible, and I’ll improve the economy.” Now that he’s not holding up his end of the bargain, it’s unlikely voters will hold up theirs.

If You Don’t Name a Bad Guy, You Become the Bad Guy

Democrats probably don’t have to do anything in the short term other than watch. But I worry that even know, we won’t hold Trump fully accountable for the damage he’s causing. Because as Republicans became obsessed with playing the blame game, Democrats left the field.

Joel Benenson, who was among other things President Obama’s main pollster, used to give presentations to speechwriters every now and then. Something I’ll always remember him saying was, “Every speech needs a bad guy.”

Obama understood this. Think about his 2004 convention speech which launched him to national fame. It was a speech about unity - about how we have more in common than we think - but it also included a condemnation of “the pundits trying to slice and dice us into red states and blue states.” One can debate whether that was entirely true. But as a matter of rhetoric, it’s interesting - even a unity speech needed a villain.

Fast forward 16 years, to 2020. I thought Biden’s speeches were mostly quite good - in particular his State of the Union addresses, which were excellent. But in a quiet, grumbling-to-myself-in-the-shower kind of way, I always worried that as president, Biden never named a bad guy other than Trump. And even then, he never connected Trump to the problems most Americans cared most about. He could have said, “Trump botched the pandemic response, which is why we have worldwide inflation.” Or he could have said, “Economics 101 says that if prices are higher than ever and corporate profits are bigger than ever, something’s not right.” When the Supreme Court overturned student loan forgiveness, he could have spoken, honestly, about the corruption of the Court and the consequences of allowing McConnell and Trump to pack it. Etc, etc, etc.

I totally understand that these things are easy to say from outside the building. I also understand the instinct not to complain. But I also think that, at least in part, Democrats became a party afraid to blame bad actors because they defined themselves as the opposite of Trump. The problem is that if you’re in charge - or want to be in charge - and you don’t name a bad guy, it makes it very easy for the public to decide that you’re the bad guy.

Now is Not the Time for Vision

Today, Gretchen Whitmer is coming to Washington to call for a bipartisan approach to manufacturing policy. Clearly, she and her advisors think that the best way to respond to Mad King Tariff is lay out a broad, expansive, forward-looking alternative.

This is, in my opinion, insane.

In general, I’m a fan. But rolling out a manufacturing policy agenda? Now? That’s like bringing a gun-violence prevention plan to a gunfight.

At some point, we should absolutely lay out the industrial policy a future Democratic administration would pursue. But right now, our message should be:

1. Trump and his MAGA allies are maniacs - and the fact that it took a near Great Depression to get them to pause the mania doesn’t change that fact.

2. Democrats tried to warn you about Trump and his MAGA allies being maniacs.

3. The only way to get ourselves out of this mess is to replace the maniacs with people who aren’t maniacs.

That’s it. That’s enough. Before projecting ourselves to January, 2029, let’s please, please, please take this moment to make sure voters know exactly who’s responsible for all this madness. And to the extent Democrats want to go further - which they really don’t need to - they should make sure that the blame for this disaster extends beyond a single issue or moment. For example:

Let’s remind people that Trump’s approach to national security, public health, medicaid, and social security is every bit as reckless as his approach to trade.

Let’s remind people that Trump’s allies in Congress could put a stop to this at any time, and choose not to.

Let’s remind people that the best-case political scenario for Republicans, where other countries make some performative deals and Trump declares victory, is still a massive blow to our economy. This one worries me the most, because it’s the obvious next move for Trump if he cares at all about his political standing. Democrats should be out there saying, in advance,“Even if Trump finds an off-ramp, he’s hurt our credibility and relationships with allies in ways that will make everything more expensive going forward and make an economic crisis more likely in the future.”

Finally, let’s remind people that while tariffs have triggered an immediate crisis, Trump is planting ticking time bombs in every corner of American society. When those time bombs go off, we’d better make sure voters know who hold responsible. Not just because MAGA will try to blame Democrats for failing to fix what Trump has broken fast enough, but because political pressure is the single best way to ensure this stuff doesn’t happen again.

The Danger of a Blame Vacuum

There’s one more reason to focus aggressively on playing the blame game right now. It’s only a matter of time - and probably not much time - before Trump starts looking for a scapegoat. Already, Roger Stone and Alex Jones are running ads on Twitter about a “globalist” cabal trying to crash the economy to hurt Trump. How long before people on the right start to explicitly blame the Jews? Or using an economic crisis to justify even more secret-police style tactics against immigrants? Or blaming the national debt, and then saying (completely falsely) that the only way to cut the debt is to slash medicaid and social security?

After all these years, Trump has finally encountered a crisis he’s having trouble pinning on something else. This is not a moment to debate the fine points of industrial policy, or to present a sweeping alternate vision. It’s a moment to hold our leaders fully accountable for the harm they’re causing.

If we fail to do that, we have only ourselves to blame.