Donald Trump appeared to completely forget Thursday that Kamala Harris wasn’t the president for the past four years during a breathless, lengthy rant on immigration.
After a hearing at a New York City appeals court, Trump delivered a low-energy stump speech , where he attempted to hold his opponent solely responsible for every beat of the Biden administration’s immigration policy.
“Four years ago, Kamala inherited the most secure border in U.S. history, with the lowest illegal immigration on record,” Trump said.
“Those who violated our borders were captured, detained, and quickly sent back home under the Trump administration. But on her first day in office, Kamala Harris terminated every single Trump policy that sealed and secured the border.”
Already, it was startlingly clear that Harris’s name could be replaced at any point with President Joe Biden’s.
Trump then complained that Harris had been the one to order an “immediate stop” to the construction on the border wall when it was “almost complete.” He claimed that Harris had suspended all deportations, instituted catch and release “across the entire Southern border,” and “sent Congress a bill demanding amnesty for all illegal aliens, every single illegal alien, even if they’re criminals, even if they’re murderers, even if their drug dealers… human traffickers… she wanted amnesty for everybody.”
He also seemed disappointed that she had “canceled” his Remain in Mexico policy. There’s only one problem: Harris isn’t solely responsible for any of this stuff because she isn’t president. She didn’t “order” or “terminate” or “cancel” any Trump policy because she didn’t have the authority.
For example, the disastrous Remain in Mexico program, which was used to send nearly 70,000 migrants back into Mexico, was suspended by Biden after there were widespread reports of severe human rights violations and serious logistical issues.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Trump has seemingly forgotten who exactly he’s running against. When Harris first became the nominee, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Trump was having a hard time adjusting—three months later and he still doesn’t seem to have gotten a grasp on things.
Later in his speech, Trump took aim at Harris for slamming his efforts to kill a bipartisan border bill earlier this year, which would’ve granted $20 billion in emergency spending at the southern border, in the most restrictive border legislation pushed by a Democratic president in recent memory.
“She keeps talking about this law that they tried to put through Congress, but fortunately Congress was too smart for her,” Trump said “It would’ve been a disaster.”
“The damage was done, they’re trying to make it look better now. But the damage was done over the first three years. They’re trying to do anything to make it look better. Because it doesn’t poll very well for them—but it polls very well for me.”
Trump seemingly can’t help but give away the game for his motivation for killing the bill: a weakened border hurts Harris among voters, but gives him and his fear-mongering, anti-immigrant platform a boost.
A less than coherent Trump claimed that he won in 2016 because “I fix the border,” and whined that in 2020, “I couldn’t talk about the border because I fixed it, it was great.”
“But now we can talk about the border, because this border, they un-fixed it,” Trump said.
“This border is the worst border. And by the way, 25 times worse and more deadly, than the border in 2016.”
It is unclear where he got that number. According to Customs and Border Protection , the agency had a total of 408,807 encounters along the southwest border in 2016. In 2023, that number was about 2.5 million—only about six times greater.
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