Joe Biden was all sweetness and light during his visit to the southern border on Thursday. “Join me – or I’ll join you – in telling Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill,” Biden said, addressing Trump directly. “We can do this together.”
What a great guy, eh? Never mind the million times he's called Trump a "threat to democracy" or compared Trump to Hitler.
And never mind that he's going to continue to accuse Trump of being a domestic threat and proto-Nazi for the rest of the campaign. Biden has an illegal immigration problem, and distracting voters by making inapt comparisons to Hitler is just about all he's got.
“The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime,” Trump said in Eagle Pass, Texas, adding that Biden has “the blood of countless innocent victims” on his hands.
It's a primal attack by Trump that Biden has no good answer for. The media will point out that statistics don't show any such migrant crime wave. But stats are irrelevant. It's perception that matters in politics and the perception that illegal aliens are committing an inordinate number of brutally violent crimes is not being fed by Trump. It's being pushed by mainstream media reporting on crimes being committed by illegal aliens.
Biden raised the issue that the border bill Trump rejected was supported by a bipartisan group in Congress.
“The majority of Democrats and Republicans in both houses supported this legislation until someone came along and said, ‘Don’t do that, it’ll benefit the incumbent,’” Biden said Thursday in a reference to Trump.
“That’s a hell of a way to do business in America for such a serious problem,” he added. “We need to act.”
"We" should have acted a year ago when the migrant surge began. Trying to blame Trump for a problem he didn't create is ludicrous. It's a legitimate question to ask why Republicans should pull Biden's chestnuts out of the fire he created.
A lot in the border bill would have been worth keeping. That it took a national crisis to get Biden to agree to most of what Republicans have been complaining about on the border only shows that the GOP was right all along.
After touring the border along Eagle Pass with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Trump laid the blame of recent noteworthy crimes allegedly committed by migrants across the country directly at Biden’s feet, including the killing of Laken Hope Riley in Georgia, whom Trump said was “barbarically attacked – almost unrecognizable.”
Riley, who Trump repeatedly called “beautiful,” was “brutally assaulted, terrifically beaten kidnapped and savagely murdered,” Trump said.
“The monster charged in the death is an illegal alien migrant who was led into our country and released into our communities by Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump said.
Biden is considering issuing several executive orders on the border that, lo and behold, look a helluva lot like Trump's executive orders he issued during his first few months in office.
Biden is reportedly considering an executive action that would restrict migrants’ ability to seek asylum at the US-Mexico border if they crossed illegally. The plan, if enacted, is sure to invite fierce criticism from immigration activists and progressives, including people who have already soured on Biden due to his handling of the war in Gaza.
Biden’s apparent openness to consider that move signifies his awareness that immigration is turning into a poisonous issue that can harm him in the general election.
Biden previously signaled openness to Republican-favored concessions in order to get the border bill passed. He had suggested he would shut down the border if the then-proposed legislation were signed into law.
Leftists claim that shutting the door to asylum seekers who cross the U.S. border illegally violates international law. That's nonsense. The U.S. is a sovereign nation and can say who can and who can't enter the United States. The law says the U.S. must consider all requests for asylum, not that it must break its own laws to do so.
Voters have made illegal immigration the number one issue of the campaign. That Biden is trying to mimic Donald Trump's border actions shows the potency of the issue and Trump's advantages in using it.
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