The presidency of George W. Bush was bookended by two catastrophic national crises: the 9/11 attacks, and the financial crash. In between, the Bush Administration catastrophically botched the invasion of Iraq, particularly its aftermath, and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
Now, twelve years after the disastrous Bush experiment came to a merciful end, the presidency of Grand Nagus Drumpf has been marked by another national catastrophe: the COVID-19 pandemic, and the one-two punch of resulting economic calamity. It seems that every time a Republican is elected president, a series of national disasters follows.
If you live in the Republican paracosm, the foregoing catastrophic failures of the United States Government to either prevent or competently manage the aftermath (and thereby minimize the damage) of a large-scale national disaster, have one thing in common: Not one of them was the fault of the sitting President.
We’re all familiar with the whole “Party of Personal Responsibility” never actually taking responsibility for anything, thing, so there’s no need to re-hash that. The point that I want to make today is one I’ve made before, which is that by shifting blame (be it to past Democratic presidents, Democrats generally, or foreign actors) away from Republican presidents, what the GOP and its enablers are telling us is that Republican presidents are either powerless or incompetent, or both — which makes one wonder why anyone would want to elect one.
According to Republicans and their fans, 9/11 was Bill Clinton’s fault for not catching and killing Bin Laden in 1999, and for “allowing” the hijackers to enter the country in 2000; Bush, who had been in office for eight months, was powerless to prevent the attack. The botched response to Katrina was the fault of state and local officials [all Democrats, of course]; Bush, half a year into his second term, was powerless to mitigate the damage. The financial crisis was the fault of a Carter-era housing law and, somehow, certain congressional Democrats’ purported unspecifed directives to The Big Banks™; Bush, who had had seven years to regulate the banks through his Commerce and Treasury Departments — the entities that actually regulate the financial industry — was powerless to prevent the crash.
I remember during the Bush years it always struck me as odd that the GOP’s fans and media enablers would try so hard to twist themselves into pretzels to deflect blame away from their then-Dear Leader, because the net effect of it was to declare that this man they lionized as an historically-great, brilliant, resolute, Mount Rushmore-worthy leader, was nonetheless utterly powerless (or incompetent) to prevent or mitigate any of the disasters that occurred under his leadership, irrespective of whose fault they were or what their proximate causes were. What they were telling us is that we can’t expect a Republican president to solve problems that previous Democratic administrations, foreign actors, or anyone else, caused.
Yet very few people seemed to realize this, or to read it that way.
The same thing happened during the Obama years, except then the Republicans were lionizing America’s Job Creators™ — you know, the wealthy, powerful men, corporations and industries that own the GOP — decrying their victimization at the hands of the Administration, their crippling “uncertainty” over potential changes in the law, regulation, and taxation that the President might impose on them, and how they were not hiring anyone because the President, in failing to acknowledge their self-evident awesomeness, had hurt their feelings. What John Boehner, et al. were telling us is that American businessmen, these inscrutable titans of industry and high-finance, are too stupid, incompetent, selfish, vain, and emotionally fragile, to do business and comply with the law at the same time.
Now, as we head into the 2020 Republican National Convention, the GOP has apparently settled on “it’s all China’s fault” as the go-to excuse for the Grand Nagus’s epic failure and inability to prevent, mitigate, or competently handle the COVID-19 crisis. Anyone using the phrase “China virus” as part of an RNC-related drinking game had better have Poison Control on speed-dial. As I and many others have said and written many times, Grand Nagus Drumpf is the ultimate embodiment of the last 30 years of Republican politics and “conservative” media; no one alive is better at blaming others, praising himself, and playing the resentful victim of “unfair” criticism, than he is. He was just the first to actually say out loud, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”
I’ve been asked by colleagues whether I plan to watch the RNC or any part of it this week, and I’m inclined to answer no. I’m really not interested in buying what the Republican Party or the Grand Nagus is selling, and I have a severe allergy to toxic bullshit; the relentless self-praise, resentment, bitterness, passive-aggression, barely-disguised malice toward whole categories of people (in which I and many of my loved ones fall), and whining about perceived mistreatment (viz., people not buying what they’re selling), is a tax on my mental health.
As such, I don’t think there’s any doubt that one of the overriding themes of this year’s RNC will be Nothing Is Ever Trump’s Fault, because it’s the Democrats’ Fault or Obama’s Fault or Biden’s Fault or Hillary’s Fault or The Media’s Fault or China’s Fault. What that ultimately means is that even if all that were true, the Grand Nagus is powerless to solve any problem that’s anyone else’s Fault; that he’s incapable of cleaning up messes that other people made, or of mitigating the damage that other people caused. That’s what Republicans want in a President? Apparently so.
What I really wish would happen is for political commentators to realize this, and to have this take on it; to ask, in response to anyone pinning blame (for the coronavirus, or whatever) away from Trump, “So what?” And then follow up with, “Isn’t it his job to handle the crisis, mitigate the damage, and solve the problem, regardless of whose ‘fault’ it is?”
There’s a great line in the movie Rising Sun, where Sean Connery’s character explains to Wesley Snipes’s character one of the key differences between Japanese and American business; as quoted by IMDb:
The Japanese have a saying, "Fix the problem, not the blame." Find out what's f***ed up and fix it. Nobody gets blamed. We're always after who f***ed up. Their way is better.
Republicans clearly don’t think so. And it’s really hard to fathom how that helps them, in that blaming others for the source of every problem that a Republican president fails to prevent, mitigate, or handle competently, only makes that president look weak, incompetent, and powerless.
