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It’s not exactly a secret that air travel concerns are growing among Americans. As The New York Times noted, recent problems “have resulted in major delays and cancellations, led to safety concerns for travelers and emerged as a major challenge for the Trump administration.”
To address this “major challenge,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference in which he appeared desperate to pass the buck to the Biden administration, despite the fact that many of the recent problems emerged after the Trump administration got to work.
But I was struck by how, exactly, the former Fox News personality tried to avoid blame.
“The cracks that you are now seeing today were highlighted actually over the last four years,” Duffy said, adding, “[T]he president was understanding the cracks at the end of his administration and was going to fix it four years ago. But the last administration, they did nothing about it.”
I’m not altogether sure what the Cabinet secretary was even trying to say — I think he was making an effort to explain Donald Trump’s disinterest in the issue during his first term (remember “infrastructure week”?) — but the idea that the Biden administration “did nothing” to address systemic issues is the exact opposite of the truth.
But there was one other comment of particular interest.
“We didn’t have to be here,” Duffy said. “This did not have to be our story. Over the last four years, the last administration, they knew this was a problem. And by the way, during Covid, when people weren’t flying, that was a perfect time to fix these problems.”
I don’t mean to sound picky, but it’s astonishing just how often Republicans forget who was president five years ago.
The “perfect time” to work on systemic issues was “during Covid”? Perhaps — but does Duffy remember who was president “when people weren’t flying”?
I’ll give him a hint: It wasn’t Joe Biden.
This comes up far more often than it should. Last summer, for example, Trump insisted that “the White House” was responsible for trying to suppress a controversial report — a move he claimed ultimately “rigged” the 2020 election. What he didn’t seem to realize was that he was accusing his own White House, not Biden’s, since the Democrat didn’t take office until 2021.
A year earlier, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blamed the Biden administration’s policies for a Michigan woman whose sons died in 2020 — when Biden was a private citizen and Trump was president.
Months later, Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas blamed Biden for “paying people to stay home” in 2020, referring to a law that Trump signed. The same week, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado blamed the Democratic president for Covid-related school closures in 2020 — which, again, was a year that Biden spent campaigning, not in the Oval Office.
It also wasn’t too long ago when former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed to crime data from 2020 to blame Biden for the U.S. murder rate, apparently unaware that it was her former boss who was president at the time.
Last year, then-Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, before she was appointed to a U.S. Senate seat, took aim at the Biden administration’s approach to criminal justice protests in 2020 — when there was no Biden administration.
Duffy, in other words, isn’t alone among Republicans with short memories.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.