It feels like a lifetime since Joe Biden was in the Oval Office, such is the turmoil and transformation unleashed since he went home to Delaware.
But one person in Washington never stops obsessing about the 46th president — his predecessor and successor.
Donald Trump rarely appears in public without complaining about Biden’s policies or flinging an insult at his mental or physical capacity.
His obsession betrays deep personal and political antipathy and spite towards a predecessor who has left the political stage. It’s also built on a foundation of Biden’s failures, especially over a surge of migrants across the southern border and a legacy of elevated consumer prices.
Yet Trump’s own deteriorating political position raises questions about the long-term viability of his all Biden, all the time strategy. After all, the former president has run his political race. Trump is now in power. And voters still aren’t happy.
“We inherited a total mess from the Biden administration,” Trump said Monday, opening a forum on his $12 billion bailout for farmers. His own tariff war with China made the rescue necessary — but Trump blamed Biden for agriculture’s woes.
It’s not just farms. Everything’s Biden’s fault, according to Trump.
Trouble in the auto industry? Blame Biden, as Trump did last week, saying he was officially terminating his predecessor’s “ridiculously burdensome” fuel efficiency standards introduced to battle climate change — a crisis the current president ignores.
What about the war in Ukraine that Trump promised to end in 24 hours? That’s Biden’s fault too, Trump says, as Russia would never have invaded in 2022 had he still been in office. “It was Joe Biden’s war, not my war,” Trump told “60 Minutes” in November.
The president has been taking heat because of the affordability crisis. But he insists Biden caused it. “I inherited the worst inflation in history,” he said, falsely, last week at a Cabinet meeting. “There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” Biden’s name came up more than 30 times, showing that Trump’s subordinates know there’s one sure way to please the boss: blame his predecessor.
After two National Guard members were shot in Washington, DC, last month, allegedly by an Afghan man who worked with the CIA during America’s longest war, Trump pinned the blame on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan orchestrated by “a disastrous president, the worst in the history of our country.” While the alleged assailant came to the US under Biden, he was granted asylum in Trump’s second term. And Trump ignored criticisms that he exposed National Guard troops by sending them into US cities.
When Trump was hammered for pardoning a former Honduran president serving a 45-year-federal sentence for drugs trafficking, he claimed the conviction was a “Biden set-up.”
The president took his Biden fixation into the realm of self-mockery before Thanksgiving. “He used an autopen last year for the turkeys’ pardon,” Trump said.
A personal obsession — and comparison
Why can’t Trump let Biden go?
One reason is that he always needs a foil. His quest for dominance depends on constantly beating up on adversaries. And he can’t let grudges lie.
Trump’s antipathy for his former foe also appears genuinely personal. Not surprising perhaps since he blames the Democrat for orchestrating the criminal indictments he faced after his own first term. (Biden always insisted that the Justice Department and local prosecutors acted without consulting the White House).
Trump is also cruelly preoccupied with the 83-year-old former president’s physical and mental acuity in and out of office.
On Saturday, Trump recalled playing golf with nine-time major champion Gary Player. “He’s 90-years-old … he shot a 70 with me the other day. We’re playing pretty far back too. He’s incredible. You think Biden could do that? I don’t think so, he can’t lift a club” Trump said at a reception for Kennedy Center honorees.
At 79, Trump is proud and vain about his belief he’s in better shape than Biden. But since he’s again the oldest man to take the inaugural oath and watched Biden age visibly in office, does a frisson of fear also creep into the president’s thoughts? Occasionally, Trump hints at wistfulness over his mortality, even while insisting he’s in almost superhuman shape. “I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong. There will be someday. That’s going to happen to all of us. But right now, I think I’m sharper than I was 25 years ago. But who the hell knows?” he said at the Cabinet meeting last week — during which he appeared to doze off.
One thing Trump can’t blame Biden for
There’s another possible root of Trump’s Biden obsession. Life is tough as an incumbent president. Biden’s record is fair game. But Trump’s policies are now causing their own damage.
Despite the president’s adamant refusal to believe it, tariffs increase costs for consumers. And the president’s unwillingness to match Biden’s vast packages of arms and ammunition to Ukraine partly explain why Russia feels it has the luxury of continuing to wage war.
Voters are now looking for answers from Trump, not Biden. After all, he’s the one who conjured a dystopian picture of an America stalked by destitution and violence and vowed “I alone can fix it” in 2016.
Still, Trump’s wildest rhetoric contains a grain of truth. Had Biden’s presidency been a stunning success, Trump wouldn’t be in office now. The former president’s state of denial on an immigration crisis and an inflation spike played a huge role in the decision of many voters to give Trump a second chance in the White House.
And the former president’s decision to seek a second term despite his advanced age culminated in a disastrous debate performance that led him to abandon his campaign and a sequence of events that culminated in Trump’s reelection.
Trump is far from the first president heap blame on a predecessor. Biden’s entire presidency — especially during its first dark months during a pandemic — was an implicit rebuke of Trump. He blamed the Afghan withdrawal debacle on his predecessor’s timetable. And he based his ill-fated reelection bid on a warning that Trump’s return would buckle America’s soul.
President Barack Obama made an art form of blaming his predecessor, President George W. Bush, for the financial crisis that he took on in 2009. He was still at it during his reelection campaign. “We’ve made sure to do everything we can to dig ourselves out of this incredible hole I inherited,” Obama said in 2012.
The blame game never ends.
Vice President JD Vance previewed a possible campaign theme for the administration as it tries to defy political gravity ahead of the midterm elections next year when he tried to offload blame for the affordability crisis. “The hoax is the idea that it’s our fault and not the Democrats’ fault. And I do think that’s a totally bullsh*t narrative,” he told NBC in an interview last week.
But the problem for the administration is that voters — who unlike Trump live in the present — aren’t buying it.
In a Fox News poll last month, 62 percent of Americans said they blamed Trump for current economic conditions while 32 percent blamed Biden. Trump’s approval rating sits at 39 percent in CNN’s poll average.
Polls are one thing the president has yet to blame his predecessor for. Although he probably would if he could.
