The Blame Game in Prime Time: A Strategic Anatomy of Trump's 2025 Congressional Address

How Trump’s speech to Congress used blame-avoidance tactics to reframe risk, redirect accountability, and reinforce power

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Blame as Structure: Naming Harm, Assigning Responsibility

Donald Trump’s March 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress wasn’t just a checklist of policies — it was a carefully constructed exercise in strategic blame avoidance, as theorized by Christopher Hood in The Blame Game (2011). At the heart of Hood’s theory lies the PAH + PR model of blame, where perceived avoidable harm (PAH) and perceived responsibility (PR) combine to create a blame event.

Throughout the speech, Trump uses this logic with surgical precision. From border insecurity to inflation, the harms are clearly defined, and the responsible party is unambiguously named: Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. “Under Joe Biden, the worst president in American history,” he declares, “there were hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month.” The message is clean, binary, and personal: he is not the problem — they are.