The finger-pointing has begun. Or rather, the single finger pointing away from the Oval Office has begun.
In a display of political predictability that surprises absolutely no one, President Donald Trump spent the early hours of Wednesday morning executing his favorite strategic maneuver: blaming everyone else. Because in the eternal Trump doctrine, accountability is an alien concept. He always points away from himself. Victories belong to him alone; defeats belong to the universe.
A president must take responsibility for a national rebuke of an agenda. Leadership requires looking at the scoreboard, acknowledging the voters’ message, and adjusting course. Instead, Trump’s reaction to a crushing midterm defeat sounds less like a commander in chief and more like an AI chatbot glitching under pressure, spouting hyperbole and unfounded information. To hear him call the last two years “the most successful period in the history of any president” is to listen to a script completely detached from reality.
It is entirely possible to acknowledge where this administration succeeded. The deregulation push provided a spark for domestic manufacturing, energy independence numbers remained robust, and certain judicial appointments delivered exactly what a large portion of the country wanted. Some measures were undeniably good for America.
But a presidency cannot be evaluated only on its high points while treating catastrophic losses as someone else’s fault.
First up on his chopping block was his own base. For months, Trump explicitly urged rally crowds to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” They did — and they voted accordingly, as detailed by the Independent. Yet, speaking in an interview with the New York Times, Trump shamelessly reversed course, claiming the losses occurred precisely because his name wasn’t literally on the ticket, depressing turnout. It takes a unique brand of political gymnastics to ask for the credit when a strategy works but blame the mechanics when it fails.
Next came the candidates themselves. In an interview with Fox News, Trump shrugged off the severe voter backlash to his trade and foreign policies and simply threw his own hand-picked GOP contenders under the bus, stating they just failed to secure their races. Behind closed doors, his own political aides were reportedly berated for feeding him “inaccurate polling.” Then, inevitably, he turned on the media ecosystem that helped build him, lashing out at Fox News on Truth Social for daring to give airtime to the Democratic opposition.
We have seen this movie before. Whether it is a bad economic indicator, a policy misstep, or a historic midterm disaster, the script never changes. The target of his ire shifts depending on the day, but the one constant is his complete inability to look in the mirror.
Trump blames everyone but himself. So what else is new?