By Ben Whedon
The awesome responsibilities of the presidency can be a heavy weight to shoulder, a lonely burden of ultimate decision-making authority enduringly encapsulated in the words of the iconic sign President Harry Truman kept on his desk in the Oval Office: “The buck stops here.”
President Joe Biden, however, has time and again sought to sidestep the weighty burden of history through the simple expedient of passing the buck for presidential choices gone awry to his predecessor.
With Biden’s job approval rating remaining well underwater, his administration is redoubling efforts to blame its perceived failures on former President Trump — a practice dating back to its botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 and stretching right up to the present, with its much-panned responses to the Chinese spy balloon and the Ohio toxic train derailment.
In the five examples that follow, administration officials have made at least some effort to blame their problems on the decisions of their Trump administration predecessors. These efforts have varied in their level of directness, but at the core of each is an insinuation that the last administration dealt the current one a bad hand.
Here are five leading examples of Biden administration blame-shifting:
1. “We’re constrained”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this week appeared to blame Trump’s policies for the East Palestine, Ohio, train disaster. The episode saw a number of train cars containing toxic chemicals derail, leading officials to evacuate the town and order a controlled burn of the toxins to prevent an explosion.
The environmental fallout and possible harm to residents has focused critical scrutiny on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The incident is merely the latest in a string of infrastructure and travel fiascos that have dimmed the former presidential candidate’s once bright political star.
Buttigieg attempted to explain his agency’s efforts to improve rail safety via a Twitter thread this week, when he appeared to cast blame for the Ohio incident on the prior administration.
“We are making historic investments on rail safety through funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, work that accelerates this year and continue [sic] in the years to come,” Buttigieg wrote. “In June we announced $120 million in grants to help improve railway safety.”
The secretary went on to list DOT efforts, both funded and planned, to improve rail safety and respond to hazmat incidents — but he did not directly identify a cause of the recent derailment.
Instead, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor conceded that “[w]e’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe.”
Buttigieg did not directly blame the Trump administration’s 2018 rule change for the derailment, and an ongoing investigation has not yet made any such determination. However, Buttigieg’s inclusion of the rule change in an explanation offered “[i]n the wake of the East Palestine derailment and its impact on hundreds of residents” led major news outlets such as Fox News to infer that the Transportation Secretary had attempted to shift the blame to Trump.
The 2015 law prompting the Trump-era rule change was signed by former President Barack Obama.
2. “Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times”
Earlier this month, Biden allowed a suspected Chinese spy balloon to traverse the continental United States for several days, allowing the military to shoot it down only once it had drifted out over the Atlantic Ocean. The lag drew jeers from Republicans, including Trump, who demanded the government shoot it down.
Amid public backlash over Biden’s handling of the balloon, a Biden Defense Department official cloaked in anonymity was quick to let slip that “Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times” under the previous administration.
After Trump himself and senior members of his administration vehemently denied any such incidents, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) chief Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck later confirmed that the military had failed to detect the previous balloons in real time and that the Trump administration was, accordingly, not aware of the issue.
“We had gaps on prior balloons,” VanHerck said. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby this week more pointedly attempted to contrast an alleged failure of the Trump administration with the purported success of Biden’s on the matter, saying the Chinese surveillance operation “was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it,” The Independent reported. “We detected it.”
3. “It was already here when I got here”
Biden falsely claimed earlier this month that inflation was on the rise during the Trump administration, a preexisting trend that spilled over into his own presidency through no fault of his own.
“Do I take any blame for inflation? No. It was already here when I got here, man,” he said, per the Washington Examiner. “Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren’t manufacturing a damn thing here. We were in real economic difficulty. That’s why I don’t, thank you.”
Inflation was low and declining during the Trump administration. The inflation rate for 2019 was 1.8% and fell to 1.2% in 2020, Trump’s final year, before rising to 4.7% in 2021 and 8.0% in 2022. In December 2020, the rate stood at 1.36% and remained a low 1.4% in January 2021. Following Biden’s inauguration, the rate rose consistently throughout 2021, except for a period of relative stabilization in the summer. By December 2021, however, that figure was 7.0% and would go on to peak at 9.06% in June of 2022.
Republicans, by contrast, have pointed to the Biden administration’s gargantuan spending packages, such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, as driving the increase in consumer prices.
4. “…Because of what the last administration did”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last month claimed that Biden’s attempt to overhaul the U.S. immigration system was a response to chaos left in the wake of Trump administration immigration policies.
“The president inherited a mess because of what the last administration did,” she said in January, per Fox News. “We inherited a mess. And, you know, Republicans in Congress made it worse by blocking comprehensive immigration reform. And so what you’re seeing from this president is he’s acting. He’s acting to protect, to continue to protect the border, secure the border, and also deal with irregular migration.”
Fiscal year 2020 was the last full fiscal year of the Trump administration. In that time U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 458,088 encounters with undocumented aliens at the nation’s land border with Mexico. Fiscal year 2021 was largely dominated by the beginning of Biden’s tenure in office and saw that figure soar to a record 1,734,686.
1. “We’re constrained”
Whether Trump blocked implementation of that law or not, whether that law would have made any difference in this wreck or not, what does that have to do with the total absence of and federal response? Talk about gas lighting; it was the most infantile example of blame shifting.
2. “Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times”
Yet another weak-ass excuse. They couldn’t detect the balloons now, but they can retroactively detect them from three years ago. Supposedly, balloons the size of small buildings, observable from the ground, went undetected (even though this one was detected from the moment it was launched). We are also to believe the most do-nothing regime in US history immediately saw balloons as a threat (though they didn’t know about them until now) and began work on detecting them… which they hadn’t detected before. Yeah… OK.
3. “It was already here when I got here”
No one surpasses idiot Biden on pointless, gigantic lies that are so easily disproven. The good times before idiot Biden are not 100 years ago, they are two years ago. Inflation was practically flat before idiot Biden and the actions of idiot Biden that triggered the inflation are widely known.
4. “…Because of what the last administration did”
Once again, a massive lie easily proven a lie. No one can recall the level of illegal immigrant crossings, record setting levels, at any time before idiot Biden. Idiot Biden took specific actions that anyone, no matter how stupid, could predict would lead to nothing but a massive flow of illegal immigrants and the criminals, terrorists, guns and drugs that come with them.
5. “We Inherited a Deadline, we did not inherit a plan”
Under idiot Biden, the Taliban chose to abrogate the deal Trump imposed because they assumed (rightly) that idiot Biden was too weak, cowardly and incompetent to respond. Therefore, there was no “Trump plan”; it was gone. Idiot Biden decided to simply go with NO plan, just like he does everything else. His only strategy is to have someone to blame for the inevitable disaster. The idiot Biden regime has tossed Trump’s plans in every area and implemented their own plan. The same could have been done in Afghanistan, if Trump’s plan was bad. Instead, they took a situation that had totally changed from the mandated conditions for our withdrawal and substituted predetermined failure.