‘Saving democracy’ by running from Harris’ record

OPINION:

A classic example of the Yiddish word “chutzpah” is when someone kills his parents and then asks the court for mercy on account of his being an orphan.

Vice President Kamala Harris may have outdone the proverbial orphan when she visited Douglas, Arizona, on Sept. 27 and did some world-class gaslighting to “save democracy.”

“In the four years Donald Trump was president, he did nothing to fix our broken immigration system,” said the woman whose administration has allowed 10 million foreign nationals to cross the border illegally, including thousands of criminals. 

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had 662,566 noncitizens with criminal records on its docket as of July 21, according to Rep. Tony Gonzales, Texas Republican. This includes murderers, rapists, drug dealers and sex traffickers.

Ms. Harris asserted that Mr. Trump “separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mother’s arms, put children in cages.”

“Children in cages”?

Remember the “kids in cages” uproar in 2018? Democrats used Associated Press photos taken in 2014 during the Obama administration and blamed Mr. Trump. The AP itself did a fact-check exposing the fraud.

As for Ms. Harris, her brief stop in Arizona was a rare border visit in the last three years, even though President Biden made her the administration’s border czar.

The gambit didn’t fool Jim Chilton, whose Arizona ranch near the border has been inundated. He told the BBC that the border has been  open under Biden-Harris and that he found three dead bodies on his land last year.

“She’s changing her mind just to get votes and lie to us. It’s outrageous,” he said.

In June 2021, NBC’s Lester Holt asked Ms. Harris in an interview why she hadn’t been to the U.S. southern border. She snapped: “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t … understand the point that you’re making.” 

That was too much, even for her defenders. So a few days later, she visited the U.S. border station in El Paso, Texas, for a few hours and posed with Border Patrol agents.

Despite the media’s damage control effort, her claim to being tough on illegal immigration is a hard sell.

“She has compared deportation officers to the Ku Klux Klan and Border Patrol agents to slave masters and has cheered on calls to decriminalize illegal immigration and curtail deportations,” The Washington Times’ Jeff Mordock and Stephen Dinan recently wrote.

Last Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, did his best to mislead viewers about his party’s record on border security in the debate with his Republican rival, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. Mr. Vance handily won the debate. 

Mr. Walz boasted that recent policy changes have reduced the flow. Mr. Vance responded that the Biden-Harris administration has had the power to secure the border since taking office but has refused to do so. 

 With the election looming, Ms. Harris is lurching increasingly into the Trump policy lanes. For instance, she has curbed her zeal to force all Americans into electric vehicles.

She once proposed to “ensure that 50 percent of all new passenger vehicles sold are zero-emissions by 2030, and 100 percent are zero-emissions by 2035.”

Consumers have pushed back hard, so she now says she opposes EV mandates. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions rules will doom gasoline-powered vehicles unless Mr. Trump is elected. 

The Trump strategy is twofold: Remind Americans how much better off they were under his policies and how unaffordable, illiberal and bizarre the Democrats have become. 

A Trump ad features an interview with Ms. Harris in which she supports sex reassignment surgery for prison inmates and illegal aliens. She is shown with a drag queen and two Biden-Harris administration officials who are transgender. The announcer says, “Kamala’s for they/them; President Trump is for you.” I saw the ad on TV during an NFL game.

The Harris strategy is also twofold: Fudge about the Biden-Harris record on everything from the border to inflation, energy policy, sexual anarchy and foreign chaos while pledging maximum support for “reproductive freedom.” 

Pro-abortion messaging, however, may not guarantee enough votes from women to overcome Mr. Trump’s lead among men and his inroads with Black and Hispanic voters.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ lawfare against Mr. Trump is falling apart. This past Thursday, a five-judge appeals court sharply questioned a New York court’s conviction of Mr. Trump and a $489 million fine for allegedly inflating his real estate holdings. 

One judge remarked, “You’ve got two really sophisticated parties in which no one lost any money.” Another said, “There has to be some limitation on what [New York] Attorney General [Letitia James] can do in interfering in these private transactions where people don’t claim harm. The immense penalty in this case is troubling.”

Finally, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the Federal Emergency Management Agency is already running out of money to help Appalachian communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. 

Money didn’t seem to be a problem when FEMA was spending more than $1 billion settling illegal aliens over the past two years into the U.S., including in many battleground states. 

If only these people in the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia had entered the country illegally.

• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.