There are times when you almost feel the Earth’s axis shifting. That was the case recently when Senator Chuck Schumer blamed someone for something, and it wasn’t Donald Trump.
Perhaps no one is more partisan than the Senate Democratic leader. He has spent months arguing that every bad thing that happens — except for the weather — is President Trump’s fault.
Hillary Clinton was the chief prosecutor. Yes, she said, she took responsibility for her own decisions. But they were certainly not the reason she failed, she explained. It was everyone else’s fault.
Of course, the Russians and Donald Trump were guilty. The Republicans and the Deplorables were guilty too. To them you could add the Trump Democrats and all the other people who bitterly clung to their Bibles and their guns. Then there were all the people who had the misfortune of dealing with the Clintons over the years.
Blaming everyone else was the Clinton machine meme. It’s the official view of those who want her to run again. Two presidential races and two losses so far, but it couldn’t be her fault. Third time lucky!
Senator Schumer surprisingly doesn’t want to do that. He and Hillary Clinton served together. Last fall, each leaned on the other to provide the votes that would allow Democrats to take control of the White House and Congress. But the American people stood in their way.
One day, Senator Schumer didn’t blame people. He blamed Hillary Clinton.
Asked about the election by a couple Washington Post reporters, Senator Schumer responded, “When you lose to someone who has 40 percent of the vote, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself.” What went wrong, he asked? “People didn’t know what we stood for, they just knew we were against Trump. And they still believe that.”
Perhaps for the first time in his career, Senator Schumer has chosen fact over fiction and engaged in a modicum of straightforward introspection. Hillary Clinton lost the election. Democratic congressional candidates lost the election. Mr. Schumer is wrong to claim that the American people understood what they stood for and rejected it. And the Democrats continue to do the same thing, which will lead to their loss in the next election.
Schumer’s admission is essential. But not because I like to say, “I told you so.” America’s problems are too massive to waste time on schadenfreude, the great pastime of reveling in the misfortune of others. We need to work together to solve the nation’s problems.
The starting point is to stop blaming President Trump for everything.
It didn’t spend America blindly and cause deficits to skyrocket. The Congressional Budget Office warns that without emergency action, we’ll be back in more than $1 trillion a year in red ink in just a few years.
The president did not nationalize the health care system, destroy the insurance plans that so many people relied on, and trigger massive premium hikes for those who could least afford them. President Trump did not impose a tsunami of fresh regulations on American businesses, raising costs and hurting competitiveness.
The president has not weakened the U.S. military, withdrawn from the world, or treated the country’s enemies better than its allies. He has not called “strategic patience” a policy while North Korea continued to develop nuclear weapons and ICBMs.
He has not appointed judges who believe the Constitution means what they want it to mean. And President Trump has not given up on defending our borders by allowing illegal immigrants to take American jobs and would-be Islamists to endanger American lives.
None of these problems are Donald Trump’s fault. And Democrats, from Senator Schumer on down, should stop acting like it’s their fault. They certainly shouldn’t blame the president for trying to fix a bunch of problems that Barack Obama left on his desk in the Oval Office when he left town.
Senator Schumer’s admission is a start. At least the Senate minority leader recognizes that Democrats lost, fair and square, because of their own actions. The next step—it’s not exactly a 12-step program, but it’s a start—is for Schumer and other Democrats to acknowledge that the Obama administration left a huge mess in Washington.
While they may still not like the president’s solutions, they should come up with their own proposals, not pretend that everything is fine. President Trump is not perfect, and not everything is fine with him. But he is dealing with the reality that America faces today, not the fantasy imagined by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their supporters.
J. Kenneth Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati and secretary of state of Ohio, is a member of the Policy Council and senior fellow of the American Civil Rights Union.
