'Donald Trump Did This': How to Beat MAGA on Border Security

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-did-this-border-security

DEMOCRATS AND PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN are overlooking what could be a powerful argument in their do-or-die campaign to make sure Donald Trump does not win the November election. They should immediately seize the problem-solver high ground on immigration and border security.

There’s never been a better or more urgent moment for Democrats to claim the mantle of pragmatists who get that corrective action is needed, and force Trump to own his nakedly political efforts to prolong the border chaos so he could run on it and win. National polls increasingly find immigration is people’s top concern, and Democrats have plenty of material to work with.

Start with Trump’s proxy veto of a bipartisan border security deal because, apparently, he feared it might work. As things stand now, he can keep attacking Biden and immigrants and insisting America will implode into an even worse hellscape of chaos and violence—unless he wins.

Inconveniently for Trump, the U.S. crime rate is falling and statistics show that immigrants, documented or not, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. But millions buy into his fantasy that he’s a savior come to deliver the United States from American carnage, part deux. A past and possibly future president who would rather fuel a crisis than welcome a solution? The ad writes itself:

Scenes of border chaos. Conservative Republican Senate negotiator James Lankford touting that bipartisan deal as a win for stricter border controls. The Trump-friendly Border Patrol union endorsing the deal as “far better than the status quo.” Biden repeatedly embracing it as “the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen.” Trump saying Republicans would be “STUPID” to support it. Speaker Mike Johnson calling it dead on arrival in the House. The tagline: “Donald Trump did this.”

*snip*