The Buck Stops Nowhere

A president who never owns anything, and a party that used to know better

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There was a time, not so long ago, when the Republican Party I grew up in claimed to believe in something it called manhood. Not the swaggering, hairspray-and-bronzer version sold at political rallies, but the older, quieter idea: that a strong man stands up, looks the country in the eye, and says, “That one is on me.” Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that read “The Buck Stops Here.” Ronald Reagan, after Iran-Contra, walked into the East Room and said the words out loud: a few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages, my heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. He took the hit. He took it because that is what a leader does.

Donald Trump has never taken a hit in his life. And the party that used to lecture the rest of us about responsibility now spends its days inventing new people to point at.

Look at the last week. Look at Spirit Airlines.

On Saturday morning, May 2, the lights went out at Spirit. After two bankruptcies, a failed merger, and a desperate attempt at a federal bailout that the airline’s own bondholders rejected, the country’s original ultra-low-cost carrier shut down at 3 a.m. and stranded a generation of travelers who flew it because nothing else was cheap enough. Within hours, the Trump administration had its talking points loaded and ready to fire — and every single one of them pointed at somebody else. Joe Biden. The Biden Justice Department. The judge who blocked the JetBlue merger in 2024. Antitrust enforcers. Career civil servants. Anyone, in other words, who was not in the building when the decisions of the last four months were being made.

Is there something to the merger argument? Sure, a little. The Biden DOJ did block the JetBlue deal, and reasonable people can argue whether that was the right call. There is also a case that Spirit was so wounded by the time JetBlue showed up that the merger might have dragged JetBlue down with it instead of saving Spirit. But neither of those debates is what actually killed the airline this spring. What killed Spirit is sitting in plain sight, and the CEO said it himself in his shutdown statement: jet fuel. Spirit’s restructuring plan was built on jet fuel costing about $2.24 a gallon in 2026. By the end of April it was $4.51. That is not a rounding error. That is the entire business model of an ultra-low-cost carrier set on fire.

And what set it on fire? The war with Iran. The same war that has driven Brent crude up more than fifty percent since February, that has pushed pump prices over four dollars, and that has the IEA calling the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz the largest supply shock in the history of the global oil market. Ultra-low-cost flying — the whole proposition that a working family in Detroit can get to Orlando for ninety bucks — depends on cheap fuel the way a candle depends on wax. Take the wax away and you do not have a candle anymore. You have a wick and a memory.

The administration knows this. It just refuses to say it, because saying it would mean admitting that a war the president chose has consequences the president owns.

Which brings us to the war itself.

The Iran war is now polling at Iraq-2006 and Vietnam-early-1970s levels of unpopularity. Trump’s approval is in the mid-thirties in nearly every major poll, and only twenty-two percent of Americans approve of his handling of the cost of living. Sixty-two percent disapprove of the military action against Iran outright. The Pew numbers, the Reuters/Ipsos numbers, the Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos numbers — they all tell the same story. The country does not want this war.

So what does the president do? He blames Democrats. He blames the press. He blames Congress for asking when the sixty-day War Powers clock started ticking. He blames anyone with a microphone who points out that Americans are paying four dollars a gallon and watching airlines collapse because of a conflict the White House launched without making a serious case to the public. He never made the case. There was no Oval Office address explaining why this was worth it, no honest accounting of what victory looks like, no plan for the day after, no leveling with the country about what it would cost at the gas pump and at the airport. He just did it, and then he got mad that people did not like it.

Meanwhile, on the actual information battlefield — the one fought on phones, in feeds, in the algorithm — the United States is getting outmaneuvered by a regime running a Lego cartoon studio out of Tehran. Iran’s official accounts have racked up roughly 900 million views in the first weeks of the war. AI-generated rap diss tracks calling the president a “loser” and a “puppet” are pulling more eyeballs than the network news. The Iranians figured out, faster than our own communications shop, that the war for public opinion in 2026 is fought in fifteen-second clips and shareable jokes. And this is from a completely unfunny regime who suppresses humor and creativity. And while they are doing that, what is the White House communications operation doing? Attacking Hakeem Jeffries. Attacking Chuck Schumer. Posting clip after clip about Democratic senators. Picking fights with American politicians instead of selling an American war.

You cannot expect the country to support a war you will not even bother to defend. And you cannot defend a war while your only message is that the other team is mean.

This is the through-line. This is the pattern.

When the Strait closes, blame our allies. When prices spike, blame Biden. When the airline collapses, blame the previous DOJ. When approval craters, blame Democrats. When the war goes sideways, blame the press. When the press won’t cover it the way he wants, blame the press again. There is a name for a leader who can never locate the source of his own problems, and it is not “strongman.” It is “weak.”

That is the part the old Republican Party would have understood instinctively. The whole conservative theory of character — the part I actually believed, the part a lot of us actually believed — was that responsibility is the price of authority. You take the job, you take the blame. You make a mistake, you say so, you fix it, you move on, and the country respects you more for it, not less. Everyone makes mistakes. It is human. What is not human, what is something smaller than human, is to know you are at fault and to spend every waking hour insisting that someone else did it.

And then there is Vladimir Putin.

The president is reportedly preparing to invite Putin — Putin — to the G20 at his own golf resort in Miami this December. He is on the phone with him about Iran. His envoys are flying to the Kremlin. He treats the man with a deference he has never once shown an American general, an American judge, or an American voter who disagreed with him.

And Putin, by the way, is weak. His Iranian ally lost his Supreme Leader to an Israeli-American decapitation strike. His Venezuelan client lost his presidency to a commando raid. His army is bleeding in Ukraine. He is the diminished autocrat of a shrinking empire, and the President of the United States is treating him like the headmaster he wants to impress. That is not strength. That is the posture of a man who has spent his whole life confusing volume for spine.

A real leader would walk to the podium tomorrow and say: I made the call on Iran. The price at the pump is on me. The hit to the airlines is on me. Spirit going under hurts, and some of that is on me too. Here is what I am going to do about it. Here is what I got wrong. Here is what I am going to fix.

He will not say any of that. He will never say any of that. And the people who used to wear “Personal Responsibility” on their lapel pins will keep clapping, because the only conviction this version of the party still holds is that whatever happened, it was somebody else’s fault.

The buck used to stop here. Now it just keeps moving.

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