All of this came to mind recently when the former president recently said he wasn’t responsible for killing the bipartisan border bill that he killed months earlier. NBC News ran this report a few weeks ago:
“Let me tell you, number one, I didn’t stop it,” Trump said.
In case anyone needs a refresher, it was last fall when congressional Republicans said they were so desperate to deal with U.S./Mexico border policies that they took a radical step: GOP officials said that unless Democrats agreed to a series of conservative reforms, Republicans were prepared to cut off military aid to Ukraine and let Russia take part of Eastern Europe by force.
Making matters worse, the calculus was electoral, not substantive: The former president didn’t want Congress to hand President Joe Biden an election-year victory on one of the party’s top priorities. Republicans followed Trump’s lead and concluded that they’d rather have a campaign issue than a solution.
The list of GOP policymakers who said that Trump was responsible killing the bipartisan deal was not short. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, blamed the former president for the legislation’s demise. So did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who helped write the bill.
The Harris campaign put together a montage of congressional Republicans who explained publicly that the bill died by Trump’s hand.
Here is a montage of Republicans pointing out that the border is not solved because Donald Trump killed the border deal pic.twitter.com/esToXagiuA
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 27, 2024