Less than 24 hours before White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was warning against blaming the government for the Texas flooding tragedy, President Donald Trump was already pointing fingers — while denying the finger pointing, says CNN analyst Aaron Blake.
“If you look at [the Texas tragedy], what a situation that all is, and that was really the Biden setup,” said Trump, while denying his cuts to the National Weather Service had anything to do with the deaths of more than 100 people and children. “That was not our setup.”
“But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either,” CNN reports Trump quickly added as he departed from a weekend at his New Jersey golf club.
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“This has become Trump’s M.O.,” Blake writes. “When something bad happens — including tragedy — Trump’s reflex has been to blame his predecessor. And often, despite Leavitt’s admonishment, he casts blame very quickly.”
After a tragic January crash in the Potomac River near Washington D.C., Trump blamed the Biden administration, along with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies — despite no evidence linking them to the death of 67 people. Four months later, after a slew of crashes, technical problems and “traumatized air traffic controllers,” Trump claimed “Biden didn’t do a thing for four years.” Blake notes many administrations had deferred improvements for air traffic controllers, including Trump in his first term.
Trump also heaped blame on “Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy” after a recent antisemitic firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado, even though the Egyptian suspect in that attack did not cross the border illegally, but arrived on the kind of tourist visa that Trump’s first administration frequently awarded.
When Trump’s Gaza ceasefire fell to pieces Trump did not blame Israel or Hamas.
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“I would say that the blame for that is Biden more than anybody else, because I had – as you know, Iran was broke, and he allowed them to become rich,” Trump told Time magazine.
Blake says Trump invokes Biden for his administration’s every failure and setback, be they egg prices, tariff destruction or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Trump even managed to get a dig into his predecessor after the Signal-gate scandal, when Trump’s people managed to invite a reporter into a top-secret discussion of a military attack on Yemen. Trump’s argument: Biden should have launched the attack earlier
“Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen, which is basically a certain group within Yemen, the Houthis, and this should have been done by Joe Biden and it wasn’t,” Trump said. “And that’s caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.”
Read the full CNN report at this link.