Donald Trump’s overarching narrative for the debate was that Joe Biden has diminished U.S. power by opening the border and allowing millions of “Illegal immigrants” released “From prisons, jails and mental institutions” to come into the country to “Take our jobs,” overwhelm our health care and Social Security systems, and rape and kill us.

Rather than pointing out Trump’s utter lack of concern for people’s well-being, Biden’s rebuttal fell into the trap of trying to respond to Trump’s tirades, allowing the former president to control the agenda and tone of the debate.

Trump used this as an opportunity to point out how little progress has been made under Biden and that Biden helped drive these disparities through his embrace of the “Superpredator” myth in the 1990s.

While many in the Biden administration and its key constituencies favor dialing back criminalization, they feel that it is politically impossible to state that clearly and openly, leaving the president to quietly support some good programs, while publicly leaning into a police-centered crime control strategy that will never be able to compete with Trump’s undiluted authoritarianism.

Biden’s weak policies and incoherent responses during the debate may give us another four years of Trump and his drive to turn the U.S. into a despotic kleptocracy.

  • NoSuchAgency@lemdro.id
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    5 months ago

    Strong immigration policies? It took him 3.5 years to do anything about the border after undoing everything Trump had in place. And Republicans were the first ones that came up with a border plan that would actually work called HR2. Dems shut it down.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Remember when the Democrats offered the Republicans every single thing they wanted on immigration and they voted against it because Trump wanted them to?

      Oops. Guess they could have gotten their border plan that you claim would have worked and decided to not do it because it wasn’t politically expedient.

      • NoSuchAgency@lemdro.id
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        5 months ago

        Wrong. They didn’t offer Republicans everything they wanted. That’s just completely false. HR2 was a much better bill at getting the border under control, or even just reinstating the executive actions Trump had in place before Biden took office.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Dude, you’re regurgitating shit from an AI as if it’s true. You have no room to criticize anyone’s so-called talking points.

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Republicans: we don’t know, separate children from their families, let some of the kids die, cause generational trauma while withholding funding and processing.

      Biden: let’s clean up the Republican mess again, institute fair and rational expedited immigration processing with limited capacity per day that keeps families together.

      Trump did immigration “first” If you pretend he had a sound immigration policy, which he didn’t, he preferred detention and ignoring the problem, and you also ignore every president before him and then also you laud irresponsible choices that harm people and cost more money.

      • NoSuchAgency@lemdro.id
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        5 months ago

        Trump kept a lot of them out of the country, and you’re pretty naive if you think kids aren’t getting separated from families or getting killed now. Human a sex trafficking are at an all time high right now. And detention at least kept them from killing and raping our citizens.