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A pair of towns along the US-Mexico border became stages for two presidential candidates on Thursday as President Joe Biden slammed his predecessor and opponent for getting in the way of needed immigration reform and border security legislation.

In Brownsville, Texas — a border town along the Rio Grande, river — Mr Biden received a briefing from top Customs and Border Patrol personnel, including CBP Deputy Commissioner Peter Flores, Border Patrol chief Jason Owens, and Gloria Chavez, a top CBP officer who serves as the Brownsville sector chief.

Mr Biden was told by the head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division that DHS requires “more personnel” and “more resources,” including additional detention beds, technology for monitoring asylum seekers while they await hearings, as well as more cooperation from cities and states by having them alert ICE when they arrest people who aren’t legally present in the US.

Mr Biden was also told about non-intrusive inspection technology that could be purchased with the held-up supplemental legislation to prevent illicit fentanyl from being trafficked into the US.

He replied: “We can’t afford not to do this”.

In remarks to DHS personnel, Mr Biden praised their border enforcement efforts, telling them: “No one works harder for a safe and secure border than all of you”.

The president said it was “long past time” for action on the border security deal held up by Republicans, which was painstakingly negotiated by a group of bipartisan senators including Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema, and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy.

He described it as “the toughest set of border reforms we’ve ever seen in this country”.

“It’s pretty basic. With this deal, we could hire 1500 additional border security officers in between ports of entry,” he said, adding that staffing at CBP has been “flat” for years, even while border agents worked large amounts of overtime and made “major sacrifices”.

Mr Biden said it was “long past time” for a pay increase when he signed legislation in December to give border agents a raise, but said more was necessary.

“It’s time to step up,” he said. “The bipartisan border security deal is a win for the American people. That’s a win for the people of Texas and it’s fair for those who legitimately have a right to come here to begin with. It’s a win for the people are brown. So I believe that’s why the Border Patrol Unit endorsed it. I believe that’s why the national Chamber of Commerce endorsed it.”

Biden lays into Trump for urging Republicans to oppose compromise border bill

The president recalled how Mr Trump’s command to Republican senators and the GOP-controlled House leaders pushed them to shelve the bill so the ex-president could keep demagoguing about immigration on the campaign trail, rather than actually enact legislation that could alleviate problems at the border.

“This bill was in the United States Senate, it was on its way to being passed. Then it was derailed by rank partisan politics,” he said. “The US Senate needs to reconsider this bill. And those senators who oppose it, need to set politics aside and pass it on merits, not on whether it’s going to benefit one party or benefit the other party. It’s about whether it benefits the American people”.

He also said House Speaker Mike Johnson, a close ally of Mr Trump, needs to allow an up-or-down vote on the border package, and noted that it had bipartisan support until Mr Trump ordered Republicans to oppose it.

“The majority of Democrats and Republicans in both houses supported this legislation until someone came along and said ‘don’t do that, don’t benefit the incumbent,’” he said, adding that pushing to kill a bill for such partisan reasons was “a hell of a way to do business in America for such a serious problem”.

“We need to act — it’s time for the speaker and some of my Republican friends in Congress who are blocking this bill to show a little spine,” he said before finally acknowledging his predecessor’s competing visit to the Lone Star State in Eagle Pass, Texas.

“Here’s what I’d say to Mr Trump … instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me — or I’ll join you — in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan borer security bill,” he said. “We can do it together. You know, and I know it’s the toughest most efficient, most effective border security bill this country has ever seen. So instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done? “

At the same time Mr Biden was touring Brownsville and calling for more resources, the former president, who launched his first presidential campaign by accusing Mexico of sending “crime,” “drugs,” and “rapists” across the southern border and ended his term by fomenting an attempted coup after the lost the 2020 election, was meeting with federal and state personnel allied with his goal of significantly reducing nonwhite immigration and blocking anyone from seeking asylum in the US.

Ex-president’s visit tries to replicate presidential pomp with help from partisan allies

In an ersatz approximation of a presidential visit, Mr Trump travelled to Eagle Pass, Texas aboard his bespoke and self-branded 757, and was met by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican ally who has devoted significant state resources to undermining the federal government’s efforts to reform immigration laws whenever Democrats have controlled the White House.

Mr Trump and Mr Abbott toured sites where he has used Texas National Guard personnel to block federal agents from carrying out border enforcement duties, often with the use of razor wire and armed soldiers working to keep border agents from rescuing migrants in distress.

They were accompanied by Brandon Judd, the Trump-aligned head of the US Border Patrol Union. Mr Judd, who is an active Border Patrol officer, delivered a blistering tirade against Mr Biden and praised Mr Abbott’s efforts to undermine the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

“What President Trump has seen right here is he’s seen how his policies have worked, but he’s also seen how he can expand upon those policies once he takes goes back into the White House. He has seen how Governor Abbott has been able to use his policies to secure this specific area at the epicenter of the last two years of the illegal border crisis that we have had to endure,” said Mr Judd, who claimed that Border Patrol officers are “upset that we cannot get the proper policy that is necessary to protect human life. to protect American citizens. to protect the people that are crossing the border illegally”.

“We can’t do that because President Biden’s policies continue to invite people across,” said Mr Judd, who is nominally a federal civil servant charged with serving in a nonpartisan fashion no matter which party controls the White House.

But the duelling visits, one official and one ersatz, offered a window into the funhouse mirror of Mr Trump’s efforts to present himself as a shadow president with the aid of state and federal officials who have rejected Mr Biden’s legitimacy and the legitimacy of the federal government without consequence.

Trump remarks light on facts, heavy on racial innuendo

Mr Trump, who also met with Texas national guard soldiers under Mr Abbott’s command, delivered a bizarre, falsehood-filled rant flanked by the Texas governor and Mr Judd, in which he accused Mr Biden of deliberately allowing an “invasion”.

“This is a Biden invasion over the past three years … it’s allowing 1000s and 1000s of people come in from China, Iran, Yemen, the Congo,” and a lot of other nations,” he said, adding that the US was being “overrun by the migrant crime” even though crime rates in most US cities have fallen over the last three years.

“These are the people that are coming into our country and they’re coming from jails and they’re coming from prisons, and they’re coming from mental institution, and they’re coming from insane asylums, and they’re terrorists. They’re being led into our country,” he continued, calling the situation “horrible” and accusing leaders in other countries of deliberately sending asylum seekers to the US, again specifying the Congo as a source of violent migrants.

“I know many of the leaders of these other countries that are doing it and it’s not just South America, it’s all over the world, the Congo, a very big population coming in from jails from the Congo. You look at the jails. Now you take a look at the jails throughout the region, but more importantly, throughout the world. They’re emptying out because they’re dumping them into the United States,” he said.

In a statement, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez reacted to Mr Trump’s trip and speech attacking Mr Biden, calling him “weak on border security” and “weak on crime”.

“That’s why he directed MAGA Republicans to kill the toughest and fairest reforms to secure the border in decades and tried to defund the police every year he was in office,” she said.

“The truth is, Donald Trump doesn’t want to secure the border. He prefers chaos and cruelty because he’s betting it helps him politically. Last time he was in office, kids were held in cages, families were ripped apart, and violent crime skyrocketed. It’s a bad bet – one that he will pay for at the ballot box this November.”

Unless you were dropped on earth just 24 hours ago, you obviously know that Donald Trump is famous for lying about everything all the time, and that he has been telling lies for basically his entire life. He lies about dumb stuff, like that he invented the phrase “prime the pump” and that he was named “Michigan’s Man of the Year.” He lies about serious stuff, like that he saw “thousands” of supposed terrorist sympathizers “cheering” from New Jersey as the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11. He told lies before he was president (sometimes by pretending to be his own spokesman, John Barron), he told lies when he was president (by The Washington Post’s count, a whopping 30,573 “false or misleading claims”), and he’s continued to tell lies since becoming an ex-president (see: the business about having won the 2020 election). At this point, his inability to open his mouth without 47 lies flying out should really be studied by a team of multidisciplinary scientists who can dedicate their life’s work to figuring out what is wrong with him.

Incredibly, the vast majority of Trump’s lies have never actually hurt him in the slightest. After all, he was elected president of the United States in 2016 and is currently the front-runner—by a landslide—for the GOP nomination. But on Tuesday, a specific set of falsehoods very much came back to bite him in the ass: the ones he told about his real estate holdings as owner of the Trump Organization. 

We speak, of course, of the explosive ruling issued by Judge Arthur Engoron, who declared—as part of a suit brought by the New York attorney general—that Trump, his two adults sons, and the Trump Organization committed years of fraud by hugely inflating the businesses’ assets (and Trump’s net worth), which led to better loan terms and lower insurance costs. Among the most absurd examples: Engoron found that Trump repeatedly overvalued Mar-a-Lago, and in one instance did so on a financial statement by as much as, wait for it, 2,300%. While an outside appraisal put the value of the Palm Beach club at approximately $28 million, due to restrictions on how the property can be used, the Trump Organization claimed it was worth as much as $612 million.

In another instance, Trump claimed his triplex at Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet—and valued it at $327 million based on that size—when it is actually only about 10,000. Which, y’know, is a pretty big difference. “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron wrote, according to The New York Times. Elsewhere, the judge responded to Team Trump’s various defenses of its business practices by writing: “In defendants’ world, rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air…. That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

As New York magazine notes, Engoron “ordered that the business certificates that allowed the family’s limited liability companies to operate in New York be rescinded and that independent receivers be put in place to manage them. This could mean that Trump will lose control over the iconic properties that bear his name such as Trump Tower, as well as make it more difficult for the former president to do business in his home state.” On top of all that, five defense lawyers were fined $7,500 a piece for making “frivolous” arguments that the judge had already rejected. As Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Cay Johnston notes, “A judge calling a lawyer’s argument ‘frivolous’ is the equivalent of saying it is no better than nonsense from a drunk in a bar.”

A lawyer for Trump called the decision “outrageous” and “completely disconnected from the facts and governing law,” indicating that Trump will appeal. In the meantime, the ex-president is scheduled to face off at trial with New York attorney general Letitia James, who has accused him of inflating his assets by as much as $2.2 billion and is seeking damages of about $250 million.

For their part, the Trump boys have responded to the ruling by doing…exactly how what you’d expect. On Truth Social, the ex-president raged that his “civil rights” had been violated, and called Engoron a “Deranged, Trump hating judge.” In one post on X, Eric Trump claimed that the ruling is “an attempt to destroy my father” and that Mar-a-Lago is actually “arguably the most valuable residential property in the country.” Later, he accused Engoron of dragging his name “through the mud,” calling the ruling “cruel.” Trump’s namesake declared the decision “nonsensical and asinine,” adding: “This is weaponized Blue State Marxist America, & another example of the sheer impossibility of a fairness & impartiality in these areas.”

Last year, in an unrelated case, the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer were found guilty of tax fraud, among other crimes. Trump, of course, has been indicted four separate times since late March, for a total of 91 felony counts related to hush money deals, his handling of classified government documents, and trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He has pleaded not guilty in all cases. 

Republicans aren’t even trying to hide their bigotry anymore 

By Jenna Somers

New research published in Public Opinion Quarterly reveals a correlation between the number of times President Donald Trump repeated falsehoods during his presidency and misperceptions among Republicans, and that the repetition effect was stronger on the beliefs of people who consume information primarily from right-leaning news outlets.

By the time President Trump left office, he had made an estimated 30,573 false claims, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker, which informed this study. Some of these claims were repeated dozens and hundreds of times in various news and social media outlets. To understand whether and to what extent the repetition of Trump’s falsehoods affected public misperceptions, researchers at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development surveyed 754 U.S. participants on 150 of Trump’s claims; 301 participants were registered Republicans and 453 were Democrats or not affiliated with either party. The survey did not reveal that the claims were made by Trump or how many claims were true or false. After completing truth ratings on all claims, participants completed optional questions about their demographic backgrounds as well as news and social media consumption.

The researchers found that repetition of Trump’s false claims correlated with belief in the claims among Republicans but not Democrats; in fact, increased repetition of the claims correlated with a decrease in Democrats’ misperceptions. These findings build on prior research on the “illusory truth effect,” which contends that repetition increases belief in both true and false statements.

The type of media consumed may explain the partisan asymmetry in belief of Trump’s claims, as the authors write, “Republicans may consume news media that amplifies these false claims, while Democrats may consume media that ignores or outright rejects them. Thus, repeated falsehoods by Trump may increase belief regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat sees it, but because news outlets’ coverage of Trump’s falsehoods varied, Republicans were more likely to see these false claims.”

“We believe that the news media plays an important role in mediating the relation between what politicians say and what the public hears. Democrats and Republicans tend to listen to different media outlets and so were more or less likely to hear what Trump said and whether it was false,” said Lisa Fazio, associate professor of psychology and human development and senior author on the paper.

In particular, the repetition effect was strongest among participants who predominantly watched Fox News, especially among Republicans. In addition, claims repeated mostly through X, the company formerly named Twitter, were more likely to increase belief for both Republicans and Democrats, “possibly because such claims gained broad coverage through, for instance, cable news,” the authors write.

“These findings highlight the ways that prominent politicians may be able to shape public opinion, and they highlight the need for more to be done to curb the spread of misinformation in contexts like social media,” said Raunak Pillai, the study’s first author and a psychology doctoral student in Fazio’s Building Knowledge Lab.

Ultimately, the researchers say that the results of this study suggest that repeated false statements by politicians may play an important role in creating misperceptions among the public.

Fazio and Pillai collaborated with Eunji Kim, Ph.D., from Columbia University on this study.

CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump acknowledged in a new interview that, despite receiving counsel from multiple people that the 2020 election was not stolen, he pushed ahead anyway with his false claims to try and overturn the results.

The comments to NBC’s “Meet the Press” directly address a central premise of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results: that Trump knew the election claims he was making were false after being told by several close aides that he had lost.

“It was my decision, but I listened to some people,” Trump said.

In his first broadcast network interview since leaving office, the 2024 Republican front-runner also criticized members of his party over how they’ve approached abortion policy, discussed pardoning himself in the final days of his presidency and said he would testify under oath he did not direct an employee to delete security footage.

The former president said he didn’t listen to his attorneys who told him he had lost the election because he didn’t respect them and that he “respected many others that said the election was rigged.”

“I was listening to different people, and when I added it all up, the election was rigged,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker.

He added, “You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened.”

In the indictment against Trump, prosecutors detailed the “prolific lies” Trump made in the wake of the 2020 election, including knowingly pushing false claims of voter fraud and voting machines switching votes despite state and federal officials telling him the claims were wrong.

Prosecutors put forward several examples of Trump being told by his aides that fraud claims he was promoting were false. The indictment cites instances where Trump was informed that his claims were false by then-Vice President Mike Pence, the director of national intelligence, senior members of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, his own staffers, state lawmakers as well as state and federal courts.

“But the defendant disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election,” the indictment reads.

Following his election loss, Trump tried multiple avenues to overturn the results. He pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and another official to “recalculate” the numbers and “find” enough votes to let him win, and his campaign also tried to install fake GOP electors in seven swing states.

The House select committee that investigated Trump’s actions in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection argued that the evidence shows he actively worked to “transmit false Electoral College ballots to Congress and the National Archives” despite concerns among his lawyers that doing so could be unlawful.

“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” the committee’s final report states.

Trump is facing four charges in Smith’s case, including obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Smith’s federal election interference investigation is one of four criminal cases against the former president, which includes a sweeping Georgia indictment accusing him of being the head of a “criminal enterprise” to overturn the 2020 election in that state; allegations that he falsified business records related to hush money payments related to the 2016 campaign; and an indictment related to mishandling of classified documents after he left office.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in all cases and denied any wrongdoing.

Trump said in the interview that some Republicans “speak very inarticulately” about abortion and have pursued “terrible” state-level restrictions that could alienate much of the country.

While avoiding taking any specific stances himself, Trump criticized the controversial state law in Florida that bans most abortions after six weeks into pregnancy that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law behind closed doors earlier this year.

“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” said Trump, whose appointment of three Supreme Court justices was instrumental in overturning the federal right to an abortion.

Trump, who has not said what kind of federal abortion legislation he would push for or support if reelected, said he believed it was “probably better” to leave abortion restrictions up to the states instead of trying to pass federal legislation.

“It could be state or could it federal, I don’t frankly care,” Trump said.

The comments are a notable departure from his earlier comments that the federal government has a “vital role” to play in restricting abortion. Earlier this year, the Trump campaign backed off its stance that abortion should be left to the states after receiving swift backlash from the influential anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America.

In the interview, Trump also said he discussed pardoning himself in the final days of his presidency but ultimately dismissed the idea. Trump also claimed that he would be willing to testify under oath that he did not direct one of his employees to delete security footage from Mar-a-Lago after it was subpoenaed, which is included in Smith’s indictment in the classified documents case.

Trump, however, has a well-documented history of publicly expressing interest in testifying but rarely following through unless legally required to by a judge.

This story has been updated with additional information.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland has taken the rare step of directly refuting a claim made by Donald Trump.

The AG appeared at a Thursday press conference in Washington, where he took a question from a reporter on the 2024 presidential candidate’s claim that FBI agents were “authorized” by Joe Biden to use “deadly force” against him when they raided his estate and resort at Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022.

MrTrump made the claim on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday after newly unsealed court filings showed that four additional classified documents were discovered in the former president’s bedroom in the months following the initial search.

“That allegation is false, and it is extremely dangerous,” Mr Garland said on Thursday. Mr Garland personally approved the search of Mr Trump’s home before the appointment of a special counsel to handle the department’s prosecution of the former president in two separate cases.

“The document that is being referred to in the allegation is the Justice Department’s standard policy limiting the use of force,” Mr Garland continued. “As the FBI advises, it is part of a standard operations plan for searches and, in fact, it was even used in the consensual search of President Biden’s home.”

Mr Trump is accused of a total of 88 felony counts, including charges brought by the Justice Department in two cases involving his allegedly illegal retention of classified documents, as well as his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Two district attorneys in New York and Georgia also have cases against him.

In New York, the former president is accused of more than 30 felony charges related to a hush money scheme involving adult actress Stormy Daniels dating back all the way to his first run for the presidency in 2016. It was after his appearance in that case earlier this week that the ex-president says he was informed of the language in the search warrant for his home.

“Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE,” he wrote on Truth Social.

His loyalists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, have followed suit in twisting the FBI’s standard language to their own ends.

“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate [president] Trump and gave the green light,” the Georgia congresswoman wrote on X.

Mr Garland’s comments at the presser on Thursday followed an official response from an FBI spokesperson earlier in the week.

“The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the bureau’s statement read.

“No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter,” it continued.