There’s one person who won’t stop obsessing over , his predecessor and successor, The US president rarely appears in public without complaining about Biden’s policies or hurling an insult about his mental or physical abilities.
His obsession betrays deep personal and political antipathy and malice towards a predecessor who has retired from politics. It also builds on a background of Biden’s failures, especially on the issue of increased immigration at the southern border and high prices for consumers.
Yet Trump’s steadily deteriorating political standing raises questions about the long-term viability of his anti-Biden strategy. After all, the former president has given his political fight. Trump is now in power. And voters still aren’t satisfied.
“We inherited an absolute mess from the Biden administration,” Trump said Monday, opening a debate on the $12 billion bailout package for farmers. His own trade war with China necessitated the bailout, but Trump blamed Biden for the farm sector’s woes.
It’s all Biden’s fault
And it’s not just farms. Trump blames everything on Biden.
Problems in the car industry? It’s Biden’s fault, Trump said last week, noting that he formally ended his predecessor’s “ridiculously onerous” fuel economy standards that were introduced to address climate change, a crisis the current president ignores.
What about the war in Ukraine that Trump promised to end in 24 hours? And that’s Biden’s fault, Trump says, as Russia would not have invaded in 2022 if he was still in office. “It was Joe Biden’s war, not my war,” he told “60 Minutes” in November.
The president has come under fire for the accuracy, but insists Biden caused it. “I inherited the worst inflation in history,” he falsely said last week at a cabinet meeting. Biden’s name was mentioned more than 30 times, showing that Trump’s subordinates know there is one surefire way to satisfy the leader: blame the predecessor.
After the murderous attack on two National Guard members in Washington by an Afghan man who worked with the CIA during America’s longest war, Trump blamed the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan orchestrated by “a disastrous president, the worst in the history of our country.” Although the alleged attacker came to the US under Biden, he was granted asylum during Trump’s second term. And Trump has ignored criticism that he exposed National Guard members by sending them to American cities.
When Trump came under fire for pardoning a former Honduran president serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking, he claimed the conviction was “set up by Biden.” The president took his obsession with Biden to the point of self-deprecation before Thanksgiving. “He used an automatic signature mechanism last year to favor turkeys,” Trump said.
The one thing he can’t blame Biden for
There is another possible root of Trump’s obsession with Biden: life is hard for a sitting president. Biden’s work is a legitimate target, but Trump’s policies are now causing their own damage.
Voters are now looking to Trump, not Biden, for answers. After all, he was the one who created a dystopian picture of an America beset by poverty and violence and promised “only I can fix it” in 2016.
And yet, Trump’s most extreme rhetoric contains a grain of truth. If the Biden presidency had been a resounding success, Trump would not be in office now. The former president’s refusal to acknowledge the immigration crisis and runaway inflation played a huge role in many voters’ decision to give Trump a second chance at the White House.
And the former president’s decision to seek a second term despite his advanced age culminated in a disastrous debate performance that led him to abandon his campaign and a chain of events that resulted in Trump’s re-election.
Trump is far from the first president to blame a predecessor. Biden’s entire presidency — especially during the dark first months of the pandemic — has been an indirect rebuke to Trump. He blamed the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco on his predecessor’s timing and based his ill-fated re-election bid on a warning that Trump’s return would destroy America’s soul. President Barack Obama had made an art of blaming his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the financial crisis he took over in 2009. He even did so during his re-election campaign. “We’ve done everything we can to get out of this incredible hole that I inherited,” Obama said in 2012.
The problem for the administration is that voters — who, unlike Trump, live in the present — don’t believe it. In a Fox News poll last month, 62 percent of Americans said they blame Trump for current economic conditions, while 32 percent blame Biden. Trump’s popularity is at 39% in the CNN poll average.
The polls are one of the few things the president has yet to blame his predecessor for. Although he probably would, if he could.
