The 2024 Recriminations Are Here, But Not As Expected

I was right, but I was also wrong.

Let me explain.

A little more than a year ago, I argued that, in the event of a Trump victory, the post-election blame game among Democrats would make for some fantastic political entertainment.

The part about the recriminations was correct — they are fantastic. But the part about who would be made to suffer was wrong.

I had mistakenly believed that former Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced her dotard patron at the top of the ticket a mere three-and-a-half months before Election Day, would pay the biggest price of anyone. And why wouldn’t she? Sure, Trump’s second term is unquestionably Joe Biden’s fault, but Harris was the candidate, and she lost decisively.

I assumed Biden would find a way to scapegoat his vice president for handing Trump another four years in the White House. Surely, the man who has been in Washington, D.C., since the year of the Munich massacre, and who undoubtedly has Rolodexes brimming with the names of seasoned “political tricksters” and other comms goblins, would find a way to shield himself from the fallout of his botched re-election bid.

Surely, I reasoned, Biden, who entered national politics before the Supreme Court had even ruled on Roe v. Wade, would lean on decades of goodwill, influence-peddling, and gossip-mining to convince party leaders to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of a woman who had not spent enough time in the nation’s capital to build any kind of relational, quid-pro-quo network of allies and donors.

I was wrong.