Blame the Last Guy
Trump’s SOTU blame game and the authoritarian tendency to point fingers.
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Donald Trump is still not over Joe Biden.
Trump mentioned Biden by name at least four times in his State of the Union on Tuesday. Each reference was, of course, negative—Biden caused the worst inflation in American history (plainly false); everything was stolen and rigged under Biden; Biden created America’s housing problem; Biden personally left the door open for illegal immigrant murderers. Biden, Biden, Biden!
This wasn’t an aberration. Thirteen months after Joe Biden left office, Trump remains fixated on the forty-sixth president. He comes up constantly in Trump’s interviews and social media musings.
Now, Joe Biden was far from perfect. I’ve been critical of his leadership and believe he shoulders significant responsibility for paving the road to Trump 2.0.
But the current president’s real beef with Biden is not substantive—it’s personal. Biden is only the person to have defeated Trump in an election. The ex-president’s late departure from the 2024 race denied Trump the opportunity to best him in a rematch. Now the demagogue-in-chief’s bruised ego is America’s problem.
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Contrast this with the behavior of other presidents. In their inaugural addresses, George W. Bush named Bill Clinton and Barack Obama named Bush—to thank their respective predecessors for their service. They spoke about policies they wanted to reverse or change, but they did not turn the last guy into a hate figure a la Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984.
Trump’s petty, grudge-fueled blame game complements his authoritarian persona. Authoritarianism represents a breach in the social contract—the arrangement by which people hold their leaders accountable. Yet there is no accountability if someone else is always responsible for your problems.
Look at the cycle of finger pointing in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev pinned the USSR’s problems on Stalin. Brezhnev pointed to the supposed instability of Khrushchev’s reign. And Gorbachev bemoaned Brezhnev for stagnation. Stalin, of course, couldn’t call out the messianic figure of Lenin by name—so he violently purged Lenin’s politburo instead. Blame was like a Russian nesting doll—progressively smaller men hiding within the shells of their predecessors.
Watching the State of the Union, I couldn’t help but feel like I was reliving an old Communist Party Congress. The leader lies. He lies about himself and about his predecessor. Everybody knows he is lying, but they get up for standing ovation after standing ovation. Every applause, every chant of “USA, USA, USA,” is a display of loyalty, not an affirmation of truth.
Aside from being unpresidential and undemocratic, the finger pointing is just plain wimpy. MAGA loves to cultivate a macho image—look at RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth’s various workout videos or FBI Director Kash Patel downing a beer in the US Men’s Hockey Team locker room. Does passing the buck make you feel big and strong, or are you actually weak and desperate? Does a real man make constant excuses? Does a provider shunt responsibility? Or does he take charge and confront his challenges head on? I think you know what Trump and his apologists are willing to pass off as masculine.
This should all prompt Democrats to look in the mirror. They certainly do not engage in the same degree of personal blame games as Trump—and every condemnation of the president is richly earned. Still, there’s a well-documented habit among Democrats to fall back on being “not Trump,” which in 2026 is clearly not enough. If Democrats want to really distinguish themselves from the president, then they can lean into a positive vision for the future as their first line of attack.
That doesn’t mean letting the president and his enablers off the hook for their abuses, but it does require ditching the tit-for-tat on every single outrage, which is exactly what Trump wants (remember what happens when you wrestle with a pig).
For over a year, Donald Trump has been shadowboxing with Joe Biden, a man who will never seek elected office again. Trump cannot move on from his grudge, but Americans must move on from the politics of grievance and blame. Feeble men point fingers. Truly strong leaders build something new.
Great piece, thank you.
Gary, I also heard you on Sam Harris discussing why wealthy tech leaders capitulated to Trump.
My work is thinking about this from an incentive structure standpoint driving their acquiescence—-it's not just individual cowardice, it's a system that evolved to reward political loyalty over innovation, extraction over contribution.
When federal contracts, regulatory frameworks, and market access all depend on political positioning rather than competitive merit, tech CEOs optimize for survival by aligning with power.
The moral failure is real, but it's amplified by an economic system that makes appeasement rational.
I even wrote a piece on this:
https://johanuniverseends.substack.com/p/the-world-ahead-2026-part-4
The piece examines how American tech leadership is poisoned by surveillance associations, why the "freedom technology" narrative collapsed, and what happens when the most powerful technology is built within authoritarian frameworks.
Would value your perspective…you've lived through this dynamic with different authoritarians.
Thank you,
Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
Thank you for this post. I respect and admire President Biden. He gave us four years of peaceful sleep at night. He’s a genuinely concerned and caring human being. It irritates me that t-rump continually mocks Biden, and the press is complicit in its silence ( I’m speaking to YOU too, Jake Tapper!) I’m also angry at Democrats (including Kamala) who threw Biden under a bus. Hubris is not in Biden’s dna. I strongly believe the reason he held on for so long is that in his vast political experience he knew the Democrats’ infighting and their lack of leadership would put it right where it ended up…I’m disgusted with democratic leadership that did this to Biden. He BEAT Trump, he gave us some “peace” and respite from the tangerine tornado,