The New Republic
Trump Just Revealed How He’ll Attack Biden at Debate—and It’s Vile
Greg Sargent
Sat, June 22, 2024 at 6:00 AM EDT·7 min read
You can’t say you weren’t warned: At the upcoming presidential debate on June 27, Donald Trump plans to highlight a handful of horrific murders—allegedly by undocumented migrants—and blame them on President Biden. We know this because Trump told us so right on his Truth Social feed.
“We have a new Biden Migrant Killing—it’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault,” Trump seethed, referring to the horrible death of a 12-year-old Texas girl. “I look forward to seeing him at the Fake debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!”
Now that Trump has telegraphed this coming assault, the Biden campaign has time to prepare a response. What should it be?
First, let’s be clear on why this line of attack is pure nonsense. Trump and MAGA figures have aggressively highlighted such killings lately, in many forms: Trump sometimes brings up victims at campaign events. MAGA lawmakers put them on T-shirts. Fox News airs visuals of migrant mug shots. And as Aaron Rupar shows, Fox sometimes even puts individual crimes in chyrons.
The argument is always that Biden’s policies are to blame for these horrors. But at the most obvious level, this is absurd, because immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans do. That includes undocumented immigrants. There is no link between immigration and violent crime.
Of course, the real Trump-MAGA message is that all undocumented immigrants should be presumed violent and dangerous, regardless of what any pointy-headed statistics say. MAGA figures are highlighting specific killings to smear millions—that is, they’re arguing by anecdote.
But even at the anecdotal level, the claims implode under scrutiny. Take Rachel Morin, a young mother who was horrifically murdered in Maryland, allegedly by a migrant from El Salvador. Trump highlighted her at a recent rally, and MAGA figures regularly cite her to criticize Biden’s new legal protections for the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.
Fox News is now excitedly reporting that her alleged killer is a “gotaway” migrant, caught and expelled from the United States three times in early 2023 before getting in undetected and carrying out the killing. This is supposed to indict Biden. But it actually undermines the Trump-MAGA case.
That’s because a repeat border crosser like this isn’t remotely like the people eligible for Biden’s new policy. Those half-million undocumented immigrants have lived and worked here for over a decade, have no criminal history, have deep ties to U.S. communities, are married to U.S. citizens, and are often raising American kids. Using a “gotaway” transient thug to smear these people itself reveals what an absurdity this whole propaganda trope truly is.
What’s more, as that Fox report established, this particular migrant was repeatedly kicked out under the Title 42 Covid-related health rule first instituted under President Trump and temporarily kept by Biden. This was a near-total ban on asylum-seeking that Trump initiated. Yet this alleged killer entered even though the tightest possible restrictions on asylum were in place. So you can’t blame this on supposedly lax asylum policies by Biden, either (he’s made them as draconian as possible, regardless).
Here’s the rub: Such migrants eventually get in precisely because they keep trying. Some percentage will inevitably be violent criminals, but that number has been really, really tiny under both Trump and Biden. Regardless, presidential “toughness” can’t do much here anyway. Such “gotaways” rose substantially under Trump, as the Cato Institute shows, apparently because Title 42 encouraged repeat efforts to cross. They did rise further under Biden but then came way down again (after Title 42 ended). Toughness didn’t dissuade crossings under either administration.
By the way, as president, Trump also released hundreds of thousands of detained migrants into the interior—because resource constraints leave presidents no choice. And let’s recall that Trump recently ordered Republicans to kill billions of additional dollars for border security. The Trump-MAGA claims collapse on every level.
Granular facts can only go so far here, of course, because Trump’s meta-messages are emotional and visceral: All undocumented migrants are violent and dangerous by definition. Biden wants to let all of them stay, and Trump would deport them all, because Biden is weak and Trump is strong.
So I asked Democratic strategists how Biden should respond when Trump brings up “migrant killings” at the debate. James Carville says Biden’s best move would be to tell a bigger story on crime, supercharged by “new information.”
As Carville told me, Biden should say directly to Trump: “When I took over from you, crime in the United States was rising. I inherited a rising crime rate. We are now in one of the greatest declines in crime we’ve had in modern American history.” Carville added: “The public doesn’t know that.”
Dan Pfeiffer, a former top communications adviser to President Barack Obama, said Biden should avoid fights over any specific murder. “Instead, the President should express concern about the victim and their family,” he said, “and pivot to a broader comparison” on immigration that stresses “the chaos that Trump unleashed in our immigration system with his cruelty and incompetence.”
Biden’s protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens offer an opening for this contrast. He can point out that Trump would cancel these protections and rapidly ramp up an effort to deport all those spouses and all other undocumented immigrants in the country. Biden’s protections humanize the people Trump would subject to extraordinary disruption and cruelty.
Indeed, former Obama adviser Jon Favreau noted that Biden can spotlight the absurdity of blaming isolated murders on that sympathetic population, people who are understood to belong to American families. “Biden should say, ‘My plan is to keep families together,’” said Favreau, who details polling on the appeal of that framing on a forthcoming podcast episode. “Trump’s plan is to rip those families apart.”
A truly strange thing about this attack is that it is everywhere in the MAGA information universe, yet it’s unfolding under the radar of the national media. Trump and his propagandists are seizing on isolated horrible killings to smear large classes of people in the vilest terms imaginable. To repurpose Brian Beutler’s formulation, this kind of shamelessness, malice, and pathological bad faith in public life is incompatible with a decent society. Yet all this is rarely covered as aggressively as Trump’s other excursions into authoritarian politics have been.
Coverage of this might involve stand-alone pieces pointing out the broader Trump-MAGA pattern of cherry-picking such killings, the absurdity of applying them to immigrants as a class, and the whole exercise’s obvious intent to stoke racial paranoia. The New York Times has done excellent articles surfacing such subterranean racialized language in other contexts. Why not here?
Such pieces might also feature warnings from experts about why such language about migrants is deeply dangerous and socially combustible, and what history tells us about where it leads.
Yahoo News
Biden-Trump’s first presidential debate could change everything. Here’s what you need to know — and how to watch.
No audience, no prewritten notes and no interruptions could make or break a future president.
David Artavia
David Artavia
Updated Sun, June 23, 2024 at 1:31 PM EDT · 6 min read
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are taking the stage in Atlanta on Thursday for the first 2024 presidential debate.
The first debate in U.S. history between a sitting president and former president is expected to be a defining moment for Biden, 81, and Trump, 78, both of whom have drawn criticism over their advanced age and opposing views on immigration, abortion, the war in Gaza and more.
The approach has changed significantly since their last face-off in 2020. Both candidates have accepted new rules and a fresh format for this debate, which will not include a studio audience and requires that their microphones be muted when the other is speaking.
That’s not all viewers can expect to see. Here is everything you need to know about the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
⌚ When, where and how to watch
The first debate will take place on Thursday, June 27, at 9 p.m. EST. It will be hosted by CNN at the cable network’s studios in Atlanta and will run 90 minutes with only two commercial breaks.
You can watch it live on CNN, Fox News or ABC, all of which will include full coverage as well as pre- and post-debate analysis. If you don’t have a cable subscription, you can livestream the debate on CNN.com, Max and Hulu, or watch it on YouTube.
🗣️ Who’s moderating the debate?
CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash speak to the audience hosting a GOP presidential primary debate
between then presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley in January 2024.
(Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, co-hosts of CNN’s Sunday morning show State of the Union, will serve as moderators.
Tapper hosts CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper and has prior debate experience. He previously moderated the first GOP presidential debate in 2015 as well as the last Democratic debate in 2020 between Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders. His latest series, The United States of Scandal, highlights the most prolific political scandals of the 20th century and was picked up for a second season in May.
A graduate of Dartmouth College and author of several books, Tapper previously worked as a senior White House correspondent for ABC News, according to his biography on CNN.
Bash, a graduate of George Washington University, anchors CNN’s Inside Politics with Dana Bash and has regularly served as moderator for numerous political town halls and debates — including six presidential primary debates in 2016 and two in 2020.
Author of the forthcoming book America’s Deadliest Election, which chronicles the 1872 presidential election, Bash launched her digital CNN series Badass Women of Washington in 2017 and premiered her latest interview series, Being…, in 2021.
📖 What are the debate rules?
Trump and Biden during the second and final presidential debate in 2020. (Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images)
This week’s debate will see major shifts from prior telecasts, which Biden and Trump have both agreed to. They include:
🛑 Will other presidential candidates appear as well?
No. In order to qualify for Thursday’s debate, a candidate had to appear on a certain number of state ballots that would make the candidate eligible to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency. The candidate also had to reach at least 15% of votes in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters, according to CNN.
Only Biden and Trump met those qualifications. Third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein failed to hit those benchmarks.
📺 How might Tapper and Bash approach the debate?
Moderators Tapper and Bash are expected to be strict enforcers of the rules and will use all available tools to “enforce timing and ensure civilized discussion,” according to CNN.
That comes four years after Tapper and Bash criticized Trump’s repeated interruptions at his first presidential debate with Biden in 2020, moderated by Chris Wallace for ABC. At the time, Bash used a profanity on the air to describe the debate, while Tapper called it a “hot mess” and “the worst debate I have ever seen.”
Both moderators experienced the brunt of Trump’s rhetoric at a rally in Philadelphia last week, when the former president called Tapper “fake Tapper” before mocking the pronunciation of Bash’s first name, according to The Hill.
For their part, Tapper and Bash are known to routinely fact-check Trump’s statements from their respective CNN anchor chairs while also remarking on his character. In 2020, Bash criticized Trump’s treatment of female reporters, while Tapper called Trump’s administration a “nightmare” following Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
They’ve also gone after President Biden’s judgment, including on foreign affairs. In 2021, Tapper criticized the president for dismissing a probe that outlined the U.S. failures in its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, while Bash questioned Biden’s failure to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman accountable for his alleged role in the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
🗓 Are there other debates planned?
Yes. The second presidential debate is set for Sept. 10 and will be hosted by ABC News, with the network’s own David Muir and Linsey Davis serving as moderators.
It’s still unclear whether the second debate will have an audience, but ABC did confirm that it will be held during primetime.
Trump has stated he wants to have more than two debates, but no dates for a third have been set as of June 23.
