Former President Donald Trump ramped up his attacks on President Joe Biden, baselessly describing the Biden administration’s border policy as “a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America” in a pair of rallies on Saturday.
Trump, of course, is himself currently facing 91 criminal charges, including “conspiracy to defraud” the United States for his conduct on January 6, 2021, but on Saturday he cast Biden as a criminal threat to democracy. “He talks about democracy,” Trump said of Biden. “He is a danger to democracy.”
Trump’s speeches in Virginia and North Carolina—two states that will hold Super Tuesday primary contests this week and that Trump hopes to carry in the general election in November—were laser-focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, which Republicans perceive as an electoral liability for the Biden campaign. Monthly migrant encounters at the southern border reached a record high of nearly 250,000 in December, though that number has since declined.
In his speech in Richmond, Virginia, Trump floated the baseless claim that Democrats are attempting to bring undocumented migrants into the U.S. and “trying to sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.” In Greensboro, North Carolina, he conjured images of “foreign armies” brought in to do electoral battle for the Democratic Party and “collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”
“That’s why a central question in this election is whether the foreign armies Joe Biden has smuggled across our border will be allowed to stay, or whether they’ll be told to get the hell out of here and go back home,” Trump added. “We’ll take them back home.”
In recent months, Biden has attempted to out-flank Trump on immigration on the issue, backing a bipartisan border bill negotiated in the Senate that would, the administration argued, constitute “the toughest and fairest reforms to secure the border we have had in decades.” Trump, who is seeking to keep immigration front of mind for voters throughout the election season, campaigned vociferously against the bill and successfully rallied Republicans to oppose it.
Both candidates made dueling visits to the border on Thursday, with Biden accusing Trump of “playing politics on the issue.” Trump, meanwhile, met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott and declared that migrants crossing the border “look like warriors to me.” (Many border officials, “including some who worked for Mr. Trump, have said that most migrants who cross the border are members of vulnerable families fleeing poverty and violence,” The New York Times reported Saturday.)
Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa responded to Trump’s speeches in a statement: “Once again Trump is projecting in an attempt to distract the American people from the fact he killed the fairest and toughest border security bill in decades because he believed it would help his campaign,” Moussa said. “Sad.”
