President Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read “The buck stops here.” President Carter actually borrowed Truman’s sign. President Barack Obama said “The buck stops with me” after a failed terrorist attack. President Joe Biden said the same about the messy end of the war in Afghanistan. But in Donald Trump’s regime, bucks never get near the Oval Office. If you listen to the MAGA cult, neither Trump nor any regime official is responsible, accountable, or to blame for anything.
The killing of one national guardsman and severe wounding of another in D.C. was a tragedy and an outrage. The killer, of course, should be punished to the full extent of the law. But to ignore Trump’s egregious decision-making that brought us to this point of reckless political violence is to invite further tragedies and condone grievous incompetence.
No matter how furiously Trump and his minions try to spin the narrative, Biden cannot be blamed for this one. Trump’s crew granted asylum to the suspected killer this April. Most importantly, Trump and MAGA governors who comply with the president’s whims and who send national guardsmen around the country willy-nilly for tasks they are not trained to perform are responsible for their safety. The guardsmen who were attacked should never have been there.
National security expert Juliette Kayyem writes:
More troops is not the answer. The National Guard has been deployed as part of the White House’s political attacks on cities run by Democrats, and the Guard members are vulnerable because politics is not a military mission….The problem of mission readiness does not get solved by deploying more soldiers. It gets solved by having a clear mission.
Even if the deployments to D.C. were legal, they lack a clear mandate and metrics of success, and have vague rules of engagement and ill-defined operating procedures. And morale is low among part-time volunteer soldiers, who have had to leave home to patrol the streets of an American city that Trump doesn’t like.
After the shooting, Trump and Hegseth added 500 guardsmen to the D.C. deployment, thereby increasing the risk to them. Trump predictably scapegoated all Afghan refugees.
As the New York Times reported, guardsmen had warned about just such a calamity months ago. “According to internal directives distributed to National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., in August, commanders warned that troops were in a ‘heightened threat environment’ and that ‘nefarious threat actors engaging in grievance based violence, and those inspired by foreign terrorist organizations’ might view the mission ‘as a target of opportunity.’”
In belated recognition that the national guard are sitting ducks, the Trump regime now has D.C. police patrolling with guardsmen. So, who is getting protection? Surely, Americans would be safer if guardsmen stayed home to perform normal duties and D.C. police were assigned to do their crime-fighting jobs. “Diverting local police to accompany Guard members would … [mean] siphoning them from other tasks in D.C. neighborhoods,” The Washington Post reports.
Trump (again in the name of immigration enforcement), has pulled federal personnel away from critical tasks including anti-terrorism. In September, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found over 28,000 federal law enforcement officials had been diverted from critical tasks. “This diversion has significantly curtailed the government’s capacity to address criminal activity in the United States,” the report found. The personnel (mis)directed to immigration included 1 in 5 U.S. marshals, 1 in 5 FBI agents, half of all Drug Enforcement Agency agents, and two thirds of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives workforce. How many crimes could have been prevented and how many dangerous characters could have been arrested had this horde of federal agents not been dragooned for counterproductive, violent, and (in many instances) illegal invasions of cities?
In November, the New York Times reported on this phenomenon:
Homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time, hampering their pursuit of child predators.
A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.
And federal efforts to combat human smuggling and sex trafficking have languished with investigators reassigned to help staff deportation efforts.
The vast majority of those seized during immigration raids are not criminals, let alone violent. Only about 8 percent of those alleged undocumented immigrants seized had a conviction for a violent crime; 60 percent had no criminal record at all.
Trump insists he is responsible for…none of the consequences of his own decisions. But the misuse of national guard, as we found out in D.C. last week, can have disastrous results. Beyond this tragedy, Trump’s actions have killed or put at risk hundreds of thousands more. The elimination of USAID has resulted in over 600,000 deaths; his $1 trillion cut in Medicare is likely to lead to an avoidable 51,000 deaths per year; and his idiotic cuts in NIH grants will result in untold number of deaths from discontinuing potentially life-saving medical trials.
Forget “buck stopping” in Trump’s regime. It’s an outmoded concept for a president who will not shoulder responsibility for his own directives. (Perhaps he could direct us to the person who is in charge.)
Americans surely know that Trump and his inert lackeys in Congress are responsible for innumerable errors and colossal misdeeds over the last 11 months. If they won’t take blame, then we need people in the executive and legislative branches willing to say the buck stops with them. That, after all, is the essence of democracy—and of adult leadership.
John Roberts and the Supreme Court made a horrible mistake when granting immunity to a president for crimes committed. That never ever should’ve been made into law. But since it was made into law, President Biden has that same immunity which this regime seems to forget.
(Perhaps he could direct us to the person who is in charge.) That’s a good question for the reporters to ask, every day and twice on Sunday.