The Potomac Shuffle: How Trump’s Blame Game is Destroying America

On a clear winter night in January 2025, an American Airlines regional jet carrying 64 passengers collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, claiming 67 lives in America's deadliest commercial aviation disaster since 2001. The wreckage still smoldered in the frigid waters when President and convicted felon Donald Trump stepped to the white house podium. He offered brief condolences. And then, true to form, launched into what Washington insiders call the Potomac Shuffle - a praciced dance of deflection, where blame flows downstream and credit miraculously goes against the current.

Trump didn't need investigators. He didn't need facts. He had, in his words, "common sense." The culprits for the disaster?

Former Presidents Obama and Biden. The Federal Aviation Administration's diversity initiatives. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The helicopter pilots, of course. It's a wonder the culprit wasn't "transgenderism." In seventeen separate statements over twenty-four hours, the President, memecoiner and sexual-abuser-in-chief assigned blame to everyone except himself or any in his already flailing, fascistic administration.

The pattern should be familiar to anyone who has taken more than a cursory glance at Trump's "career." The message Trump is sending will be the defining philosophy of his morally degenerate second term: success has one father, but failure is an orphan.

This is the culmination of a decade and a half of Republican degeneracy, the culmination of a movement that has rejected any and all sense of culpability. The conservative movement that preached personal responsibility from every podiuym and pulpit has engineered a systematic approach to avoiding responsibility entirely. They've turned "the buck stops here" into an itinerant game of hot potato. Accountability bounces from target to target, but never ever lands at the top.

We saw this during the early days of COVID-19. As the virus spread through American cities in 2020, Trump's response followed a pattern: blame China, blame Europe, blame Democratic governors, blame the World Health Organization, blame Fauci. When pressed about his "administration's" delayed, irresponsible and barely solvent response, he pivoted to new targets in an endless and typical list of grievances. The facts never mattered. It was performance, all the way down.

The system proved so effective that it evolved into the closest thing Trump and his cronies have to a comprehensive political philosophy. When a U.S.-born citizen from Texas carried out the New Year's Day attack in New Orleans this year, Trump blamed lax border security. When economic indicators dipped under Biden, it was presidential incompetence. When they soared under Trump, it was presidential brilliance. It's one of Trump's only consistencies: everything good flows inward, everything bad flows outward.

Political movements reflect their leaders' characteristics, for better and for worse, but Trump's ability to dodge responsibility in the same way he dodged the draft has become larger than life. It's now a foundational principle of the new American conservatism. His followers don't just accept it, they expect it. They crave it. They've internalized the logic that every failure, every setback, every tragedy must have an external cause, inevitably one that fits their existing, fevber dream narratives.

The Potomac Shuffle works because it exploits fundamental human psychology. We're pattern-seeking creatures who crave immediate explanations for complex events. When a plan falles from the sky, or a pandemic sweeps the globe, the hunger for answers overwhelms the patience needed to find them. Trump's doom finger feeds this hunger with fast-food explanations - satisfying in the moment (to some, at any rate) but empty of substance.

Back to the DC crash. Before the first bodies were recovered, before investigators reached the scene, the blame machine whirred into action. It couldn't be mechanical failure, or human error, or the thousand natural shocks that aviation is heir to. It had to be DEI initiatives. It had to be the previous administrations. It had to be someone else's fault. It had to be the Other. The actual investigation became irrelevant before it began.

Barry Goldwater's so-called "rugged individualism" has given way to perpetual victimhood. Personal responsibility has been replaced by perpetual accusation. There's no "tough love" here, no matter what Trump's red-tie wearing sycophants want us to believe. Only the post-MAGA specialization in tender grievance.

Something has to give. Democracy requires accountability to function - it needs leaders willing to own both victories and defeats. When a major political movement abandons this principle entirely, replacing it with bankrupt and decrepit blame displacement, the system begins to break down.

As emergency workers continue their ngrim work in the Potomac, as families mourn their loved ones, as investigators begin their painstaking search for truth, the Trumpers Shuffle on. The music never changes, the dancers never tire, and the blame never sticks to the leaders.

But those watching the performance would do well to ask themselves - what happens to a democracy when one of its major movements masters the art of avoiding responsibility while claiming all credit?

As the wreckage of accountability sinks into the Potomac, we're about to find out.