Letter to the Editor: The Buck Stops Here

In 1946 President Truman put a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said “the buck stops here”. In so doing, he acknowledged personal responsibility for the way the country was governed.

In his farewell address Truman said, “The greatest part of the President’s job is to make decisions—big ones and small ones, dozens of them almost every day. The papers may circulate around the Government for a while but they finally reach this desk. And then, there’s no place else for them to go. The President—whoever he is—has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

All the presidents who have followed Truman believed in this principle including Joe Biden. When the U.S. saw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden took ownership by stating, “The buck stops with me.”

Sadly, President Trump doesn’t acknowledge the ramifications of his own policies. On January 10, 2019, nineteen days into the federal government shutdown, a reporter asked President Trump “if the buck stops with you over this shutdown?” Mr. Trump responded, “The buck stops with everybody.”

And now it’s all Biden’s fault. The price of eggs is up due to the bird flu, but President Trump is blaming that on President Biden. The volatility in the stock market is evidently also Biden’s fault, not Trump’s own erratic handling of tariffs which is causing inflation to skyrocket and will likely result in a recession.

The national debt will soar as President Trump pushes Republicans to suspend the debt ceiling altogether because severe cuts to Education, Medicaid, the VA, the weather service, emergency management and probably Social Security and Medicare won’t pay for cutting taxes for the wealthy. Who will be to blame for that?

And then when all else fails, just blame the immigrants. It’s easy to just demonize them all.

The courts are holding President Trump responsible so he refuses to accept their decisions. Instead he attacks the court system and undermines the rule of law. With President Trump there is always someone to take the rap and that is why his chiefs of staff, cabinet members, advisors, and personal lawyers don’t last long.

At what point in his presidency will President Trump take ownership of the repercussions of his own policies instead of blaming everyone else? Those that voted for him and those who didn’t deserve a President who takes ownership of all that happens on his watch and then takes actions needed to solve problems, not create them. The American people deserve no less than that!

Barbara Vann