The message sent, perhaps more accurately, was that the USofA electorate fully bought into the Trump / Project 2025 framing of the "problems" facing the USofA.
eg:
> People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else.
And yet recently prior administrations famously did enforce contempory border protections and prioritised chasing down people with actual criminal records.
Past administrations, eg. the Republican Eisenhower, have been in favour of open borders for the cheap labour and boost to the agricultural industry.
His often cited border enforcement operation was undertaken at the request of the Mexican government who were losing labor to US agribusiness.
All that aside, the USofA Democrat party has a messaging and PR problem of epic proportions and the USofA has spiralled into a two party Hotelling's Law cesspit despite the founders largely disliking party politics - a fundemental flaw in the forward iteration of an "adequate for now" electoral system centuries old.
Sure, recent past administrations enforced border protections and prioritized deporting immigrants with criminal records. And that’s irrelevant.
The Biden administration did neither. They took active measures to strip the Customs and Border Protection Agency of its scope and authority through executive order from their first day in office. Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.
This wasn’t policy they campaigned on or announced. It wasn’t something the American people wanted, and it polled terribly even among Democrats. But they did it anyway.
Conversely, Trump had the voter’s mandate to secure the border when he entered office, but he’s managed it so poorly, created terrible optics, and has Democrats marching in the streets in every major U.S. city in support of illegal immigration. The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.
defrost|1 month ago
eg:
> People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else.
And yet recently prior administrations famously did enforce contempory border protections and prioritised chasing down people with actual criminal records.
Past administrations, eg. the Republican Eisenhower, have been in favour of open borders for the cheap labour and boost to the agricultural industry.
His often cited border enforcement operation was undertaken at the request of the Mexican government who were losing labor to US agribusiness.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback
All that aside, the USofA Democrat party has a messaging and PR problem of epic proportions and the USofA has spiralled into a two party Hotelling's Law cesspit despite the founders largely disliking party politics - a fundemental flaw in the forward iteration of an "adequate for now" electoral system centuries old.
PlanksVariable|1 month ago
The Biden administration did neither. They took active measures to strip the Customs and Border Protection Agency of its scope and authority through executive order from their first day in office. Their policies directly led to over 2.4 million border encounters in 2023 alone, the most ever recorded in the history of the country.
This wasn’t policy they campaigned on or announced. It wasn’t something the American people wanted, and it polled terribly even among Democrats. But they did it anyway.
Conversely, Trump had the voter’s mandate to secure the border when he entered office, but he’s managed it so poorly, created terrible optics, and has Democrats marching in the streets in every major U.S. city in support of illegal immigration. The Republicans make the Democrats look like PR masters by comparison.