During his Tuesday night address to a joint session of Congress, President Trump touted recently-released record-low February border crossing numbers, boasting: “All we really needed [to secure the border] was a new president.”
Indeed, the Trump administration does appear to have almost completely eliminated illegal border crossings, solely through executive action and enforcing current immigration laws. Given the dramatic change, it’s worth remembering how many journalists spent the past four years lying that the Biden administration was powerless to address the border crisis without congressional action.
For the first couple of years of the Biden administration, both Democrats and the corporate media were unwilling to admit there was even a problem. Readers will recall the Biden administration’s common refrain of: “The border is secure.”
But as the 2024 election drew near, Democrats and their media allies slowly realized most Americans actually weren’t too pleased with the countless millions of third-worlders pouring into the country. Thus, the narrative shifted to something along the lines of: Biden’s doing everything he can to control the border, but it’s just so hard to do!
At first, the Biden water-carriers suggested that illegal immigration was so complicated that no president could be expected to solve it. In January of 2023, then-President Biden took a trip down to El Paso, which prompted CNN White House correspondent MJ Lee to offer this remark:
This entire visit today to the Texas border city really highlights just what an intractable problem this is for the President, with no easy solutions.
When that thin excuse failed to convince people, the corporate press began arguing Biden was powerless to solve the border crisis without Congress. Republicans, of course, pushed back and prompted a flurry of damage control from the pro-Democrat journalists.
In January of 2024, MSNBC’s 11th Hour host Stephanie Ruhle posed this preposterous question to New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser:
Republicans keep saying, ‘Biden doesn’t need Congress, he can stop what’s happening at the border all by himself.’ Can you fact check that for us? Because we here all know that’s not true.
Nice one, Steph.
Two months later, CBS senior White House reporter Weijia Jiang claimed on the network’s streaming platform, CBS News 24/7: “There’s only so much President Biden can do with executive action, and he did try to to do whatever he could!”
Given what’s happened in just the first six weeks of the Trump administration, it’s safe to say that all of the above media narratives were outright falsehoods. The only question that remains: Which journalists were duped by the Biden administration’s excuses, and which ones were knowingly lying to their audience?
