Trump’s Don’t-Blame-Me Calculus

New York Times: “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.”