The GOP Platform Is A Pack of Lies- That’s All They Have
The U.S. is in pretty good shape right now. Inflation, unemployment, crime and border crossings are all down. Yet Trump and the MAGA Republican falsely depict the greatest country in the world as some kind of failed hellscape. “I’m sick and tired of Donald Trump shit talking America. America is the greatest country on the face of the earth — and it’s time to start acting like it.” Josh Shapiro.
Due to the success of the Biden-Harris administration, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are left with nothing but lies about our country. Because we can’t count on the “liberal” mainstream media to correct the record, I will rebut MAGA Republican zombie lies in this piece.
Please like and share this piece to anger the MAGA Republicans, the NY Times, CNN and the Washington Post.
ZOMBIE LIE: The border is out of control and it’s all Biden’s fault.
THE TRUTH: Biden inherited a mess at the border from Trump. Border crossings hit a then record high in 2019 and border crossings increased 80% in the last four months of 2020. Trump never passed a border bill and Mexico never paid for the wall. Trump was a failure on the border.
In order to clean up Trump’s mess, Democratic and Republican senators came together to draft the toughest border bill in decades. It was all enforcement and unlike past bi-partisan border bills, there was no pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and DACA recipients. It largely reflected GOP priorities.
Trump ordered the D.C. Republicans to kill the bill because he wants America to fail. Most D.C. Republicans saluted and killed the bill. One D.C. Republican said the quiet part out loud: “Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” Republican Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas said. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it.”
Numerous prominent Republicans correctly blamed Trump for the failure of the bi-partisan border bill. Mitch McConnell: “We spent months working on a bipartisan bill to secure the border, but Trump didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all. He told us to kill the bill.” Senators Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham and James Lankford all blamed Trump. The were joined by House Republicans Chip Roy and Dan Crenshaw. None of these guys are leftists — they don’t like Biden and Harris.
“Donald Trump does not care about border security — he only cares about himself,” Kamala Harris said. “As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law, and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like,” she said.
In response to the Republican sabotage of the border, Joe Biden issued an executive order restricting who can claim asylum. Biden also made a deal with Mexico in which our neighbor to the south has limited the number of people crossing the border.
Biden’s policies are working. Unlawful crossings by migrants along the U.S. southern border dropped for the fifth consecutive month in July, plunging to the lowest level since the fall of 2020. Border crossings are lower today than when Trump left office.
Harris was never the so-called “border czar” but she was put in charge of stemming migration from three Central American countries. In the last two years, that migration dropped 50%.
Nonetheless, I’m sure that Fox “News” is already working up a caravan story for the fall campaign. They tried that tactic in 2018 and the GOP was routed. The caravan disappeared the day after the election.
ZOMBIE LIE: Inflation and spending are out of control and it’s all Biden’s fault.
THE TRUTH: Inflation peaked at 9% in 2022 and is now down to 2.5%. As a point of comparison, inflation was 4.3% in 1984 when Reagan declared it was “Morning in America.”
Inflation was a world wide problem that was caused by several factors: the pandemic, Trump, Putin, OPEC production cuts, corporate concentration and Biden.
The GOP lie is that Biden’s alleged out of control spending caused inflation. Let’s look at the facts. Trump added $8 trillion to the national debt when he was president. That was a record for a single term. (The former reality TV star added $4.7 trillion to the national debt before the pandemic.) Federal spending was 31% of GDP in 2020.
Federal spending is now 24% of GDP. Virtually every Republican has voted for this level of spending. If the Republicans believe that inflation is caused by alleged out of control spending, they are to blame.
Trump’s stimulus bills totaled $5 trillion, compared to $1.9 trillion for Biden. No stimulus check has been sent for over three years.
Michael Strain of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute has estimated the American Rescue Act added 3 percentage points to inflation. Dean Baker of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, though, put that number at 1–2 percentage points.
What is also never mentioned by the “liberal” mainstream media and the Republicans is that Trump made a deal with the Saudis and the Russians to reduce oil production in April 2020. It was an oil company bailout. This big cut in production caused a huge price hike in 2021, which of course the GOP disingenuously blamed on Biden. The Trump production cuts were never restored.
ZOMBIE LIE: Crime is up and out of control.
TRUTH: According to a 2022 study from The Third Way: “In 2020, homicide rates were a stunning 40 percent higher in the 25 states that former President Donald Trump won compared to the 25 won by current President Joe Biden. Of the 10 states with the highest 2020 per capita murder rates in America, eight of them not only voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, they voted Republican in every presidential election this century.”
A review by Jeff Asher, an analyst who studies crime trends, indicated that murders increased in 2020 by approximately 29 percent in cities with a Democratic mayor and 26 percent in cities led by a Republican.
Crime has dropped significantly since Biden took office. Violent crime dropped by more than 15% in the United States during the first three months of 2024, according to the FBI.
One report from the University of Chicago shows ‘unprecedented’ declines in crime across multiple categories, including homicides and motor vehicle thefts, across more than 40 cities. Another report, from the Council on Criminal Justice, found that homicides decreased by 13%, motor vehicle theft fell by 18%, and violent crime fell overall in more than two dozen cities.
“The new numbers show violent crime from January to March dropped 15.2% compared to the same period in 2023, while murders fell 26.4% and reported rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased during that period when compared to last year by 12.5%, according to the data, while robberies fell 17.8%.
Although more than six months still remain in 2024, “it’s plausible that this will be, by far, the largest one-year decline in American history,” said Jeff Asher, criminal justice analyst and co-founder of consulting firm AH Datalytics.
The firm’s real-time review of 265 cities currently shows a 19% drop in murders nationwide compared to 2023.” CNN on June 10, 2024.
CONCLUSION
It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?