(Washington) Joe Biden attacked Donald Trump head-on on Tuesday, his very likely rival in the November presidential election, whom he accused of manipulating the Republican Party to block any reform of migration policy and any new aid to the ‘Ukraine.
“Donald Trump prefers to exploit this question [de l’immigration] rather than solving it,” thundered the Democratic president, who rarely attacks his predecessor in such an open manner, during a speech from the White House.
A spokesperson for the former president denounced a “blatant lie”, saying in a statement that Donald Trump had “created the most secure border in history, and [que] it was Joe Biden who reversed his decisions, sowing death, destruction and chaos” across the country.
At stake: a reform project blocked by the opposition, which provides for more police officers at the borders, stricter asylum procedures, and which gives the power to the president to purely and simply close the border with Mexico, in the event of Migrant arrivals above a certain threshold.
This bill, painfully negotiated for weeks by senators from both camps, also depends on the resumption of American military assistance to Ukraine, interrupted since the end of December, and any new aid to Israel.
“Supporting this bill means opposing Putin. To oppose it is to play into the hands of the Russian president, said the democrat.
Joe Biden asked for around $60 billion for Ukraine, and $14 billion for Israel. He will only have them if the Senate, then the House of Representatives, which together make up Congress, vote on the text.
But according to Republican leaders, who have a blocking minority in the Senate and who have a majority in the House, this has little or no chance of happening.
Conservatives have long called for a tougher immigration policy, while arrivals at the border with Mexico have not slowed down – more than 300,000 migrants having been stopped at the border in December, for example.
For a moment, a compromise seemed possible.
” The hardest ”
However, the campaign for the November election has already entered the heart of the matter, since neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump faces any really serious competition for the nomination of their respective parties.
And the former president, behind whom the Republican Party has already put itself in battle order, certainly does not intend to give a political victory to his rival, nor to deprive himself of a campaign argument which seems promising.
In a recent poll released by NBC, 57% of voters surveyed believe that Donald Trump would do better than Joe Biden in controlling immigration.
There is therefore no question for Republicans of supporting a project that Joe Biden presents as “the fairest”, but also “the toughest” in terms of immigration in decades.
The American executive argues, for example, that the text received the support of a border police union, which judges that it is “not perfect”, but that the reform is better than “the status quo”. . This same union, underlined Joe Biden, had called for voting for Donald Trump in 2020.
The Democratic president hopes to turn this opposition from the right in his favor.
“Every day between now and November, Americans will know that if the border is not secure, it is only because of Donald Trump,” he said.
“It is time for Republican parliamentarians to show a little courage” against the former president, he demanded.