The Republican Party used to believe in personal responsibility. Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader and soon to be party nominee in 1996, stated the Republican Party stands for a “commitment to honesty, decency, and personal responsibility.” This is no longer the case under Donald Trump.

During five decades in business and politics, he has never taken personal responsibility for anything. Not for violating the Fair Housing Act when he refused to rent apartments to black people in New York City. Not for hiring undocumented immigrants to work at his hotels and golf courses. Not for many bankruptcies and failed real estate ventures. Not for illicit payoffs to the women who claimed affairs with him. Not for perpetrating the biggest and most protracted lie in our political history that Barack Obama, the first black American president, was illegitimate because he was born in Africa.

As president, Trump blamed “liberal judges” for rejecting his initial travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries. He blamed Obama for his own policy of separating families seeking asylum. He blamed the media and Democrats for perpetrating a hoax about the dangers of the coronavirus. He then blamed China for failing to apprise us about the pandemic, even though he was briefed on it before he took remedial action. He blamed a nonexistent Obama era regulation for his own failure to provide medical professionals with adequate testing kits for the coronavirus. He blamed governors for the lack of protective equipment for health care workers.

Now Trump is setting up every American for an entirely new blame game with his misguided notion that we should abandon the stern measures to contain the coronavirus and return to normal by Easter. He wants to see the country “opened up and just raring to go” with “packed churches all over our country” in over two weeks. “It is just about the timeline that I think is right,” he added. Then with extraordinary deflection, he stated, “We lose thousands and thousands of people to the flu. We do not turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents.”