PALM BEACH, Florida — Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2024, lit up his general election opponent Democrat President Joe Biden in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News for lies Biden told during the State of the Union about the bipartisan Senate immigration plan scuttled earlier in 2024.
“It would have exacerbated the problem,” Trump told Breitbart News of the Biden-backed bipartisan Senate immigration plan. “It would have made it worse. And they allowed five thousand people a day. Those are numbers nobody’s ever heard of.”
Trump is exactly correct in that the plan would have codified the entry of thousands of migrants a day into the country, as Breitbart News has extensively reported the plain letter text of the plan shows. Part of why Biden has leaned into this message, though, is that as he is reeling from his immigration policy mistakes as president, he has sought to shift blame and responsibility for the crisis — which has seen millions upon millions of migrant entries that otherwise would not have happened — to Congress and Trump and away from himself ahead of the upcoming November election. During his State of the Union address, Biden lied to the nation by claiming that the Senate deal, negotiated by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and others, would have helped the border crisis.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In the speech, Biden said that the bill would have helped address the problems he created with the more than 60 executive actions he took as president to open the border up.
“In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country,” Biden said during the speech. When Republicans in the chamber booed Biden loudly, he testily shouted back at them, “Oh, you don’t think so? Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh? That conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned, that’s amazing.”
After rattling off several of the details in the bill — like how it would provide for more staffing and more machines and equipment at the border, but again, the bill had no substantive policy changes away from Biden’s open border vision — the Democrat president then lit into Trump by claiming he blocked the bill for political reasons.
“I’m told my predecessor called members of Congress and the Senate to demand they block the bill,” Biden said, adding that he believes Trump “viewed it would be a political win for me and a political loser for him.”
“It’s not about him. It’s not about me,” Biden said in the address.
President Joe Biden during a State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2024. (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump, when asked to respond to this claim from Biden, told Breitbart News that it was yet another lie. Trump then pointed to the House-passed HR2 border security bill as legislation that actually would help solve the problem and questioned why Biden and his Democrat allies in the Senate did not support that bill if they actually cared about solving the problem rather than just trying to shift blame off themselves for causing the disaster.
“No, we want to save our country,” Trump told Breitbart News. “This bill would have made it more complicated. It actually would have made things they are doing illegally legal. Now, the Congress [the House] passed a bill [HR2] that’s a good bill, but they wouldn’t go for it. It was actually a bill that was meant to work.”
Trump also said he believes that Lankford, the GOP senator from Oklahoma who was the public face of these negotiations that Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell used to try to generate a vessel to pass more Ukraine aid, hurt himself politically by taking part in this.
“Lankford has really hurt himself, I think — five thousand people a day?” Trump said. “You can’t let five thousand people a day. Five thousand people a day—that’s a lot of people. It’s crazy.”
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Trump also ripped Biden as “the worst border president” in the history of the U.S. and laid out how the various executive actions Biden took are what caused the crisis.
“He is the worst president in the history of our country, and he is the worst border president in the history of our country,” Trump said. “We had the best border in our history three years ago. If he did nothing — if he just went to the beach — we’d be better off. I say it all the time. Our border was getting better all the time. Nobody was coming because it was too tough to get in. If he did nothing and just left those people in place and left those policies in place…He got rid of Remain in Mexico. Who would do that? Remain in Mexico was incredible. It wasn’t easy to get either. Mexico didn’t want it. But he got rid of Remain in Mexico. I’ve never seen a thing like that before. It was so powerful. Title 42 — everything. Letting sick people come into our country. These are people with diseases that could take over our whole nation.”