The Trump administration was engulfed in a mess of its own making, and the president knew just who 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).
Many a president has fixated on the guy who had the job before him, but when it comes to talking about it out loud, Mr. Trump is, as usual, in a league of his own. Is it an all-consuming obsession — or is there a political strategy at play from a man who considers himself a master marketer and who understands the power of repetition?
“I think I know exactly what’s going through Trump’s mind,” said James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist. He guessed that Mr. Trump was trying to prepare the public for a rocky economy that may be on the horizon thanks to his own trade wars. “He sees what’s coming and he can’t blame himself, so he’s got to blame Biden,” Mr. Carville said.
The Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway argued that it would be political malpractice not to keep beating the Biden drum. She said that her old boss, Mr. Trump, “knows how to read the polls. He knows that Biden left as the least popular sitting president in decades.” She said he must continually “remind everybody what he’s inherited.”
Ms. Conway was referring to immigration issues and U.S. involvement in wars abroad, among other things. But not everything that Mr. Biden left behind for Mr. Trump was all bad. He also inherited a booming stock market and the world’s strongest post-Covid economy.
And yet, Mr. Trump has made Mr. Biden into a political boogeyman so epic and omnipresent that it is impossible to ignore. His use of the name is most commonly followed by a verb: “Biden fudged the numbers … Biden canceled it … Biden let them get away with murder … Biden’s done nothing … Biden left him up there … Biden allowed it to get out of hand … Biden left us a mess … Biden said the wrong things … Biden gave away money like it was water … Biden set us up in Venezuela … Biden allowed China to go crazy … Biden ended it … Biden really screwed up our country.”
“I think presidents think this way all the time and privately they have conversations about it,” said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton who edited a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term. “They don’t tend to say it all the time in public, and they don’t tend to focus on the person, as opposed to the agenda they found problematic.”
Mr. Zelizer pointed out that Richard M. Nixon obsessed over Lyndon B. Johnson “and why he got blamed for stuff and Johnson didn’t.” And Mr. Johnson in turn obsessed over John F. Kennedy. “He felt the Kennedy people didn’t like him, felt the country didn’t respect Johnson the way they respected Kennedy,” Mr. Zelizer said.
Ronald Reagan loomed large over George H.W. Bush’s White House. The early part of Barack Obama’s first term was consumed by the financial mess that had been left for him, but he didn’t talk in such personal ways about the man who had left that mess, George W. Bush.
“Most presidents,” Mr. Carville said, “come into office and say, ‘We want to focus on what we’re going to do, not what happened.’ Most people coming in want an agenda. They think if they talk about the past administration, they’re not talking about the future or something.”
That also used to basically be true of Mr. Trump. The first time he was president, he invoked his predecessor at the time, Mr. Obama, a lot less than he invokes the current one, Mr. Biden. It turns out that 47 talks about 46 far more than 45 talked about 44: The Times’s analysis found that during the first 50 days of Mr. Trump’s first term, in 2017, he mentioned the name “Obama” just 35 times (positively in some instances).
Comparatively, Mr. Trump mentioned the name “Biden” at least 316 times during the first 50 days of this term (almost entirely in the negative). That is more than he mentioned “Ukraine” (237 mentions) or “Israel” (62 mentions) during that same period, but not as much as he mentioned “tariffs” (407 mentions).
By contrast, Mr. Biden spent his first year in office basically treating Mr. Trump as Lord Voldemort, refusing to utter his name and referring to him instead as “the former guy.”
One former top Trump adviser said that Mr. Biden constituted an “idée fixe” for Mr. Trump. Maybe it has to do with the fact that both men’s legacies will be braided together in ways that are not true of other presidents and their predecessors.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters traces back to his refusal to believe he was defeated in 2020 by Mr. Biden. And Mr. Biden, in turn, will be remembered as a one-term president who helped usher in Mr. Trump’s return to power. The two men share the same wall at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington — their pictures are back to back.
So often, Mr. Trump’s compulsion to bring up Mr. Biden seems to have little to do with policy and is more about vitality. (Mr. Trump, who is 78, has often talked about Mr. Biden’s physique and how he looks on a beach; Mr. Biden, who is 82, has talked about beating up Mr. Trump.)
“You think Joe Biden could get into that car?” Mr. Trump asked reporters as he climbed out of a new Tesla he was showcasing at the White House this month.
Last week, Mr. Trump was on a lengthy tour through the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, of which he has been named chairman by an all-Trump-appointed board. “I had no idea how big it was, because I just walked the whole place,” he said at one point. “Believe me, Biden couldn’t have done it. He would not have been able to walk the place.”
After he finished his tour, he took Laura Ingraham of Fox News into the Oval Office to show her how he redesigned it. There were blue curtains affixed to the wall that hadn’t been there before. He pulled them back to reveal an old copy of the Declaration of Independence.
“Just went up yesterday,” Mr. Trump explained as Ms. Ingraham ooh-ed and aah-ed. He paused for a second. “Think Joe Biden would do this?” he asked.
“Do you think he’d think of it?”