Trump washes his hands of responsibility for deaths he caused

From Texas to Covid, Trump has a long history of refusing to take responsibility and shifting blame on to political rivals.

Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Donald Trump may not be very good at running things, but when it comes to shifting blame, he is truly world class. As the magnitude of the disaster in Texas becomes clearer, the one thing we can be certain of is that Trump will accept none of the responsibility.

He will insist that his decision to have mass layoffs at the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and National Weather Service (NWS) had nothing to do with the state’s lack of preparedness for the storm and the inadequate response. 

At this point it is not clear whether the layoffs at the agencies played a role in the warnings given or the speed of the response to the floods.

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The Texas offices were clearly understaffed. However, we don’t know whether that impeded their operations in important ways.

He routinely makes absurd and ridiculous statements which would be treated as a major scandal if they came from the mouth of any other politician, but instead are dismissed with an “Oh, that’s Trump” from the media.

We do know that global warming makes events like the Texas floods both more common and more extreme. For that reason, we certainly can blame Trump’s efforts to promote global warming with increased subsidies for fossil fuels and ending support for electric vehicles and clean energy. We can anticipate many more weather disasters in the years head thanks to Trump’s policies.

Weather and natural disasters are far from the only area where Trump refuses to take responsibility for his actions. The economy shrank at a 0.5% annual rate in the first quarter. This was after it grew 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and 2.8% for the full year.

Nearly every forecaster expected the economy to keep growing at a healthy pace through 2025. However, Trump’s tariff threats, budget cuts, and layoffs at the federal level managed to quickly end the economy’s growth streak and push it into negative territory in the first quarter he was in office.

Naturally Trump responded to the bad news on growth by blaming former President Joe Biden for giving him an “economic disaster.” In reality land, Trump was handed the best economy of any president in more than half a century, with low unemployment falling inflation, rising real wages, and a unprecedented boom in factory construction.

Probably the all time classic for Trump denying responsibility was his response to the pandemic. He made it clear that he wasn’t especially concerned about how many people got sick or died from Covid-19, he was only concerned that he not be given the blame.

At the start of the pandemic, there was an outbreak on a cruise ship. Trump said that he wanted the passengers to be kept on the ship so that the number of infections reported in the United States would not increase. In a campaign speech that summer, Trump said he ordered his staff to slow down the testing for Covid so that there would not be so many cases reported.

But Trump’s best moment was when he complained “the cupboard was bare,” and blamed former President Barack Obama for a lack of equipment and protective medical gear needed to deal with a pandemic. In fact, Obama had left considerable stockpiles to deal with a pandemic, but the more important point is that Trump had been president for more than three full years at that point.

If there were inadequate stockpiles, that was 100% on Trump. If he is to be taken at his word, Trump never even bothered to check on pandemic preparedness the whole time he had been in office. That was an astounding level of ineptitude.

Trump’s complaint says everything about the way he thinks. Rather than owning up to the reality of the situation, Trump absurdly sought to blame Obama for what was obviously his own failing.

The reporting on Trump’s complaint also says a huge amount about how the media adjusts its reporting to Trumpian standards. Rather than ridiculing Trump for what was obviously his own failing, it tried to evaluate the accuracy of his complaint about the stockpile Obama had left more than three years earlier.

Unfortunately, this sort of affirmative action for the son of a billionaire has been a regular feature of reporting on Trump. He routinely makes absurd and ridiculous statements which would be treated as a major scandal if they came from the mouth of any other politician, but instead are dismissed with an “Oh, that’s Trump” from the media. The idea that Trump is an adult who should be held responsible for his actions seems too difficult for many reporters to grasp.

Dean Baker is the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People," "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive," "The United States Since 1980," "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" (with Mark Weisbrot), and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.