A central dictum in the Trump White House is that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is to blame for just about anything and everything.
The Trump administration was engulfed in a mess of its own making, and the president knew just whom to blame.
It was Wednesday — two days into Signalgate — and President Trump was speaking to reporters from behind the Resolute Desk. In some grand sense, he argued, the true culprit behind the fiasco was none other than one Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen,” Mr. Trump said. “This should have been done by Joe Biden. And it wasn’t.”
This was certainly a novel theory of the case. Mr. Trump seemed to be saying that if only Mr. Biden had launched this attack on the Houthis in the first place, then Mr. Trump’s defense secretary would not have even been in the position to post the attack plans in a group chat for The Atlantic’s editor in chief to see. Yet it was also an entirely predictable response from Mr. Trump.
By this point in his presidency, it is a central dictum that Mr. Biden is to blame for just about anything and everything. There is really no topic too small that Mr. Trump won’t try to trace it back to his predecessor.
An analysis conducted by The New York Times found that during the first 50 days of Mr. Trump’s presidency, he mentioned the name “Biden” 6.32 times a day on average. It is among his most frequently used terms (he said “Biden” in more speeches than he had said “America,” for example).