The Mainstream Media Should Be Honest About Trump’s Border Sabotage. By Brian Beutler

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The Mainstream Media Should Be Honest About Trump’s Border Sabotage

And Joe Biden should bully them into it

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

One of my first pieces for Off Message encouraged President Biden to (as we say in the business) “work the media refs” more consistently. Their doom-laden coverage of his Afghanistan withdrawal and the economy’s recovery from the pandemic left Americans badly misinformed and, relatedly, helped tank his public approval. A bit of grabbing the bull by the horns was thus in order and badly needed. 

Well, it still is, and the House GOP’s seemingly successful effort to sabotage the Senate’s bipartisan border security and foreign aid bill presents another great opportunity: Everyone knows House Republicans took orders from Donald Trump, and Trump’s been quite clear that he wants to kill the Senate bill so that the border remains overwhelmed, and he can blame the disorder on Biden during the campaign. 

But Trump’s self-interested angle on this bill is often omitted from or buried in news reports, when it’s really the whole story. And unless this pattern of subterfuge is widely understood, Trump’s plan could work. 

A headline that fails to convey Republicans are motivated by sabotage.

It’s genuinely important for people to understand this nuance—Trump didn’t just oppose the bill, he killed it to sustain chaos on the border for his own political gain. But I’m not certain that will be easily conveyed to the broader public if the mainstream press does its typically poor job covering the GOP’s cynical motives. 

Sen Brian Schatz (D-HI) argued Monday that “House Republicans are underestimating how easy it will be to point out that this bill does the stuff they asked for and they suddenly opposed it because Trump wanted to deny Biden a victory. It’s quite easy to explain in the suburbs.” 

Schatz is one of the very best in the Democratic caucus, but I think he’s underestimating how easily Republicans can muddle this issue if just a few things break their way. 

It’s obviously helpful to have Trump out there underming GOP efforts to paper over their sabotage goals. He’s not supposed to confess his motives out loud, but he can’t help himself. Most recently on Monday, he told the right-wing grifter Dan Bongino that the Senate bill was a “gift to the Democrats,” and threatened the career of Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the conservative senator who wrote it. “The gift” he has in mind is a more orderly border and the reduced salience of immigration as a campaign issue. 

His most slavish allies in Congress like Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) help matters further when they admit their aim is to hurt “Joe Biden’s approval rating.” 

But most Republicans, including Trump in his on-message moments, are hard at work trying to buy themselves a mulligan. They now generally say, with utter disingenuousness, that they oppose the bill on the merits, and are on to telling lies about how the bill would meter asylum claims so that people falsely associate it with open, rather than closed borders. Trump’s more disciplined line is some version of “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill.”

It’s thus not enough to tell suburban voters that Republicans are obstructing a bill that’s loaded with GOP-backed border-security measures—after all, Republicans will just insist, dishonestly, that it’s a terrible open-borders amnesty bill. Republicans assume (correctly, I fear!) that nobody will descend from on high to adjudicate the dispute. 

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That’s why Biden would serve himself well to scold the press corps for not emphasizing what everyone in Washington knows: Trump believes the bill would reduce visible disarray near certain ports of entry, depriving him of a key source of agitprop. Even if Biden can’t guilt trip many reporters into improving their coverage, simply embedding this true assertion in a public grievance with the media would generate a lot of discourse around the question. Is Biden right that Trump killed the bill so that problems will fester? And the answer to that question will be yes. 

The salience of Republican bad faith will only increase if Trump and the House GOP somehow fail to kill the Senate bill—though it seems pretty well dead.

Why are House Republicans so desperate for it to fail in the Senate, though? 

The pat answer is everything we discussed above: They’re consumed by a deep rot of bad faith. Donald Trump wants to kill the bill. He’s been quite explicit that enacting it might alleviate an overwhelmed immigration system, making the border orderly and well secured, and he wants to beat Joe Biden by blaming him for the disorderly status quo. 

This is obviously correct, but if you read a little more closely you’ll see it doesn’t actually address the question. If Speaker Mike Johnson really believed the Senate bill would weaken border security, he could simply ensure that it never passed the House. 

But he and all his lieutenants have begged their Senate counterparts not to let it clear the upper chamber. They released a desperate statement Monday protesting too much: “Any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House. We encourage the U.S. Senate to reject it.”

And it seems to have had its intended effect: By Monday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had effectively withdrawn his endorsement, and Lankford wouldn't even pledge to vote for his own legislation.

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House Republicans will thus seemingly get their wish. But why do they want it? The answer is: They want Senate Republicans to filibuster their own bill to death because they aren’t confident they can hold Trump’s line if everyone can see they’re simply bottling up a solution to a problem. Johnson could, like Speaker John Boehner before him, simply refuse to bring an immigration bill to the House floor. But Johnson’s majority is much narrower than Boehner’s was—if House Democrats were to find a vehicle to “discharge” the Senate bill directly to the House floor, it would only take a handful of Republican signatures on a petition to force a vote. Johnson doesn’t seem confident he could enforce party unity under these circumstances. 

But it’ll be much easier for him to hold the GOP conference together if the truth about Trump’s sabotage motive doesn’t become widely known. If voters want to know why the border security bill faltered, and their news media reports ‘some say the bill would crack down on false asylum claims, but House Republicans say it’s an open-borders bill,’ Johnson will count it as a victory. But if their media tells them it’s because Republicans, on Trump orders, are taking steps to exacerbate border chaos to help them in the election, voters will be better informed, and it’ll blow up in Republican faces. 

If he presses this case with the news media, it should be an easy sell, because Republicans aren’t just trying to harm the country in this one realm to boost Donald Trump’s political fortunes. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) admitted he’ll try to kill a bipartisan tax bill pairing business tax cuts with an expansion of the child tax credit because “passing a tax bill that makes the president look good.” Trump is openly browbeating Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell into leaving interest rates higher than they need to be in order to hurt Biden. 

The through line is sabotage. Preventing good things from happening to Americans and making things worse where they can, in the hope that they take their anger out on Democrats. It’s the animating fact behind everything the GOP’s doing right now. And there’s never a bad time to encourage journalists to tell their audiences the truth.