(Dobbs) Trump: No Border Deal If It's Good For Democrats
The Republicans can't lose their most powerful campaign cudgel.
Donald Trump’s highest priority on the campaign trail is the southern border. He talks about it nonstop. Hardline House speaker Mike Johnson is even more succinct about his top priorities: “Border, border, border.”
So their U-turn is staggering.
While bipartisan negotiators in the United States Senate have been working on a border deal since before Thanksgiving, a deal that would reduce the number of people crossing into the U.S., Trump and Johnson— who profess that fixing the border is their top priority— now are doing their damndest to shut the deal down.
In Johnson’s case, it’s a dizzying reversal from what he said the very day in late October that he was elected Speaker: “Inaction is unacceptable and we must come together and address the broken border.”
Now he’s singing a different tune. Coming together is yesterday’s news. The Speaker warned in a letter Friday that if the Senate sends a deal to the House, it will be “dead on arrival.” Part of the problem that he can’t admit is, the bipartisan deal is a compromise, and in the right-wing flank of the GOP, compromise is a dirty word. Compromise, in the take-no-prisoners world of MAGA, can get you thrown out of office. During an interview with NBC News, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made that crystal clear, saying that if Mike Johnson allows any Senate deal to reach the floor of the House, she’ll force a vote to fire him as speaker. Period.
Meantime, what Johnson cited at a news conference as the barrier to a border deal is bogus: “I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.” This is stunning, because Congress and presidents have been looking for solutions for many years now. It was complicated when they started, it’s complicated now, it will be complicated as long as they work on it. But “complicated” is no reason to stop, so there must be another, and in the past few days we’ve learned exactly what it is: politics.
On Thursday Donald Trump unabashedly wrote, “A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats.” By his warped logic, a border deal is bad for the country if it’s good for Democrats.
That’s because the border is the Republicans’ big stick. It’s the red meat they feed the faithful.
People on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that the masses of migrants crossing the border has become a humanitarian crisis, but the Republicans have convinced their followers that it’s even worse than that, that it’s a national security crisis, an existential threat to the American way of life. They think they can beat Biden with this and put Trump back in the White House. If they make a deal now, which would be a victory for Joe Biden, they lose their most powerful campaign cudgel.
And yesterday, Biden made their opposition to a deal look even more transparent. He said that if the House allows the Senate bill to become law, he will use the recently added emergency powers it would give him to “shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed.”
That’s a new problem for Trump. Both publicly and privately, he has been urging his party to reject a deal, which he calls “meaningless.” Which is transparent even to some fellow Republicans. Indiana’s Senator Todd Young said, “I hope no one is trying to take this away for campaign purposes.” North Carolina’s Thom Tillis said of the pending deal, “To lose this opportunity to get it passed into law I think is malpractice.” Utah’s Mitt Romney told reporters, referring to Trump, “The fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, no fan of Donald Trump, just last week called this the “ideal time to do (the deal),” but since then he has succumbed to the cult-like power of his party’s undisputed strongman. “Politics on this have changed,” McConnell reportedly told a closed-door Republican meeting on Wednesday. Referring to Trump’s likely nomination to be the GOP’s standard-bearer again in November, McConnell said, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.” He called it “a quandary.” It is, but not the way he means it. The quandary is whether to do the best thing for the nation or to do the best thing for Donald Trump. If the deal dies, we have our answer.
You’ll remember that when he announced his first run for president more than eight years ago, Trump denounced migrants crossing into the U.S. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Now he adds terrorism and fentanyl to his list of threats that immigrants pose to America, even “the possibility of a Hamas attack” within our borders. Typical of Trump, it’s all a lie—illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita in this country than our own citizens— but it was a signal of what was to come. He told a campaign rally in Iowa that when he’s president again, “We will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
If history counted for anything, Trump would get behind a deal to make genuine fixes at the border. But what history also tells us is, he wouldn’t if it were good for Democrats.
The deal has sticking points, but there will always be sticking points. Even if Trump wins the White House in November and Republicans end up with control of both houses of Congress, Democrats will be able to put up the same kinds of barriers to Republican priorities that the Republicans are able to use today to stymie Democrats. That’s why even Republican senators are saying, this deal is as good as it’s going to get.
But Trump is unbowed. Writing on his social media website, he called any compromise “A DEATH WISH for the U.S.A.!” and said, “We need a Strong, Powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border and, unless we get that, we are better off not making a Deal.”
Of course the truth is, we are not better off not making a deal. Trump is.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thank you Greg. Excellent piece and spot on correct.
To my amazement, we are caught in a quagmire where a convicted sex offender is leading a charge of hysteria regarding the border, augmented by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green who is as unhinged as is possible to be, and supported by the third person in line for the presidency who makes all of his decisions from a religious point of view. Can the center hold if those in charge are operating with so few marbles.