Five Working Days to Blame Colin.
It seems those types who populate the White House these days spend their entire days blaming the previous administration. When I ran my advertising agency, we had a rule. Unwritten, but ironclad.
Five Days
When someone left, whether they were fired, quit, were poached, or walked out mid-brief and never came back, you had five working days to blame them for anything that went wrong afterward. Blown budget, a furious client, and the coffee machine not working. This was fair game, provided the excuse landed before the following Friday.
After that, the name was retired and never mentioned again. Like a discarded football jersey no one else gets to wear. From then on, you owned your own mess because that's capitalism, but more importantly, that's basic fucking accountability.
Five days was the entire statute of limitations on the phrase "well, Colin used to handle that" in a mid-sized ad agency with no army, no navy, and a Christmas party that peaked at $40 a head.
Donald Trump has been back in office for twenty months and, without fail, is still blaming Sleepy Joe. Daily. Twenty months. That's roughly seventeen departed Colins' worth of blame.
Imagine ringing a client and saying, "Yeah, the campaign tanked because Colin, who left eighteen months ago, picked the wrong target market.” At some point, the client stops nodding along and says, “No, Paul, it’s you. Own it!!”
Trump, bless him, built a whole brand platform all by himself, as the man's got a gift for a slogan, mainly around ‘sleepy’ Biden, who was half-conscious and barely able to find the Resolute Desk without a nurse in tow. Bit rich, given the current fella occupying said desk drops off mid-sentence.
According to the President, who is twenty months in, the allegedly comatose Biden is somehow still single-handedly running the American economy, the immigration system, several wars, and even the weather.
To me, that's not a sleepy man; that's an evil genius running a shadow presidency from a beach chair in Delaware. If that isn’t enough, Donny feels compelled to reach back twelve years and haul out Obama. (Always a hit with the MAGA crowd.)
Twelve years! In my trade, twelve years was a lifetime, as most of the staff were still in short trousers. I can’t picture the meeting where we looked around the boardroom table and said, "Well, who was in charge in 2014?” looking for a face to blame for the quarter's shocking numbers.
Donny, if you're still blaming a man who left office in 2017, you’ve got a serious problem.
Take the Reflecting Pool. A total lack of respect for the Mall. Very sad. "Nobody will ask why an Olympic swimmer is responsible for municipal algae management. They will just blame him. Nobody ever asks the follow-up question. That's not a bug in this operation; it's the entire business model."
My wise gardener Wayan, predictably, finds all of this obvious and doesn't see why I need eight hundred words to say it. "In Bali," he said, not looking up from the frangipani he was somehow bending into the shape of one of those blow-up kids’ balloons. "If the rice harvest is poor, you don't blame the man who sold your grandfather the field."
Then he asked whether Trump had ever grown anything in his life and went back to pruning, satisfied he'd wrapped up the whole argument more efficiently than I ever will.
But the blame-lag isn't even the punchline. The punchline is what's coming, because there are two live disasters right now with nobody's name on them yet, and I cannot wait to see who gets nominated for Colin of the Year.
There's a war going on, not the way anyone in the briefing room promised. And there are real American sailors paying for it in ways that will never trend like a tariff tweet.
The USS Abraham Lincoln's crew has been at sea for over 260 days and is reportedly running short of food and soap, rationing what little remains. Three hundred more sailors on the USS Benfold spent four straight days without power, drinking water, or functioning toilets in the middle of the Pacific after the generators failed.
Meals of bread and water aren't far off the mark, and it isn't a metaphor. It's a twenty-year-old from Idaho on a ship that's stayed out longer than it should have, because everyone up the supply chain was too busy blaming Colin to reorder the soap.
So who takes that one?
Sleepy Joe, by all accounts, is ready to ride off into the sunset. Obama is now sixty-five and enjoying his 11th year of a well-earned retirement, so I'm fairly confident he was not personally responsible for a generator failure on a destroyer in the Gulf.
At some point, even the fellow in charge has genuinely run out of Colins, and there will come a time when he will have to file the memo under his sign-off line. Thank you for your attention.
Even Wayan's frangipani knows when it's time to stop blaming last season's lack of rain.
Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.
