odanny
Diamond Member
Don't blame me, it's someone else's fault!
Cascading midterm losses rippled from east to west — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Washington. Recriminations from fellow Republicans poured in. A rival’s star continued to rise in Florida.
Yet when Donald J. Trump stepped onto the flag-bedecked stage at his gilded Palm Beach palace on Tuesday evening to declare that he would run for president again, it was as if none of it had happened.
The former president cannot stop trying to make his own reality and cannot start accepting responsibility for his actions or acknowledging their consequences. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of Mr. Trump, all successes accrue to him, and any failings are someone else’s fault — the 2018 midterms, when Democrats took back the House; his own presidential loss in 2020; and now 2022, the worst showing of a party out of power in two decades.
In that sense, with the smoke still rising on a national rebuke, the choreographed conviviality on Tuesday night was the ultimate in not taking responsibility.
Instead, Mr. Trump spun out an alternate vision where the news media has not reported all his successes and where much of the blame for the party’s shortcomings in the midterms “is correct,” though none of that blame belongs to him. And while the country, he told supporters, has slid from greatness to abject embarrassment in two short years, its citizens “have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through” — a suggestion that voters would have punished the party in power if they had only shared his understanding of President Biden’s depravity.
He showed, in other words, that the word “loser” remains his ultimate epithet.
“If he thinks he can win in 2024, he is going to run in 2024, and I doubt there is anyone who can change his mind on that,” said Mick Mulvaney, an acting chief of staff in Mr. Trump’s White House. “The question is whether, in light of 2018, 2020 and last week, is he — himself, and no one else — starting to recognize that if the presidential election were held today, he would probably lose.”
www.nytimes.com
Cascading midterm losses rippled from east to west — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Washington. Recriminations from fellow Republicans poured in. A rival’s star continued to rise in Florida.
Yet when Donald J. Trump stepped onto the flag-bedecked stage at his gilded Palm Beach palace on Tuesday evening to declare that he would run for president again, it was as if none of it had happened.
The former president cannot stop trying to make his own reality and cannot start accepting responsibility for his actions or acknowledging their consequences. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of Mr. Trump, all successes accrue to him, and any failings are someone else’s fault — the 2018 midterms, when Democrats took back the House; his own presidential loss in 2020; and now 2022, the worst showing of a party out of power in two decades.
In that sense, with the smoke still rising on a national rebuke, the choreographed conviviality on Tuesday night was the ultimate in not taking responsibility.
Instead, Mr. Trump spun out an alternate vision where the news media has not reported all his successes and where much of the blame for the party’s shortcomings in the midterms “is correct,” though none of that blame belongs to him. And while the country, he told supporters, has slid from greatness to abject embarrassment in two short years, its citizens “have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through” — a suggestion that voters would have punished the party in power if they had only shared his understanding of President Biden’s depravity.
He showed, in other words, that the word “loser” remains his ultimate epithet.
“If he thinks he can win in 2024, he is going to run in 2024, and I doubt there is anyone who can change his mind on that,” said Mick Mulvaney, an acting chief of staff in Mr. Trump’s White House. “The question is whether, in light of 2018, 2020 and last week, is he — himself, and no one else — starting to recognize that if the presidential election were held today, he would probably lose.”
Trump’s Don’t-Blame-Me Calculus (Published 2022)
The announcement of another White House run by Donald Trump showed that in his heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world, all successes accrue to him. Any failings are someone else’s fault.
