Asked about riots in America’s major cities, Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump’s outgoing political advisor, told Fox News:

These are Democratically-led cities and most with Democratic governors. It’s not Donald Trump’s watch.

(That didn’t stop Trump from deploying federal troops to Portland over the objections of the city’s Democratic mayor and Oregon’s Democratic governor in June.)

The suggestion that the president isn’t responsible for the whole country, but only to those parts that are loyal to him, is outrageous.

But it is how Trump has governed.

Disaster

Trump has disparaged Democratic-governed cities like Baltimore, as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live,” and Chicago, as a “disaster”.

He threatened to pull federal funding from California when it refused to cooperate with federal law enforcement to round up illegal immigrants.

He instructed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire,” according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, “because he was so rageful that people in the state of California … didn’t support him and that, politically, it wasn’t a base for him.”

Demonization

When Trump tapped his son-in-law to develop a national COVID-19 strategy earlier this year, Jared Kushner demurred because the coronavirus had only affected densely populated coastal states at the time, which vote Democratic.

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors and that would be an effective political strategy,” one expert told Vanity Fair.

Demonize your political opponents long enough and eventually you don’t even care if they die.