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.
Continue reading “THEY did it! The Signature Theme of the Trump Presidency”