Over the summer, amid undeniable evidence that Democrats were likely to do well in the midterm elections, Donald Trump started laying the groundwork to avoid blame for Republican defeats.

Conservative voters are “very angry at Republicans,” the president told Punchbowl News in early August. As part of the same exchange, he said he wasn’t altogether sure why so many voters were upset, though he quickly added, “I mean, they’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me.”

That wasn’t even close to being true, though the president kept going a few weeks later, using his social media platform to promote a lengthy rant from a conservative influencer who wrote, as part of a longer message, “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are f—ing up right now.”

The messaging wasn’t subtle: Republicans were likely to suffer some real losses, and Trump planned to reject any efforts to hold him accountable, even as he demanded that his entire political party turn the election cycle into a referendum on his unpopular presidency.

As the election results came in and the magnitude of the electoral smackdown became obvious, the president continued to deny responsibility for his failure. MS NOW noted, as part of the network’s live coverage:

On a call with Fox News late last night, Trump said that the Iran war has led to a spike in gas prices, which he dismissed as “a short-term problem, but for long-term gain.” He said some of the Republican candidates that he backed “fought me,” and that his MAGA base did not like that.

But Trump — the leader of the Republican Party who insisted that voters pretend he was on the ballot — refused to take responsibility for the wipeout. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” he told Fox News.

A modest number of GOP officials and candidates have been willing to push in the opposite direction. For example, Bobby Charles, who suffered an embarrassing loss in Maine’s gubernatorial race, told Politico that he was “optimistic for the future because Trump’s going to be gone in two years.”

Similarly, Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska — who’s retiring this year, and whose district just flipped from red to blue — told The New York Times that Trump’s election analysis was “nonsense,” adding that the president was the “No. 1 reason” for the party’s brutal losses.

It won’t be too surprising if we see more comments like these in very near future, as Trump becomes a rather pitiful lame-duck president and Republican officials stop fearing his wrath, and the partisan infighting is likely to be fascinating in its own right. But in the meantime, Trump is taking on the related task of finding a scapegoat. If he hopes to avoid the blame he has earned, who should be held responsible?

On election night, he appeared eager to point the finger at an unexpected target.

In the early evening, the president published an item to his social media platform in which he accused Fox News of conducting “hit job” polls with “BULLS—!” responses. Soon after, Trump published a follow-up post, condemning Fox News for “spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!”

Shortly before midnight, he abandoned all subtlety, writing online that Fox News “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”

It’s not surprising that the president who never accepts responsibility for anything wants to pass the buck, but if he seriously expects anyone to blame the midterms on the cable news outlet aligned with Republican politics, he’s going to need a Plan B.

The post As the GOP’s blame game begins, Trump points the finger at … Fox News? appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.