GREENSBORO, N.C. \u2014 Donald Trump made a renewed attempt to turn criticism that he is a threat to democracy on its head, accusing President Biden without evidence of conspiring against the United States with his policies at the southern border.<\/p>\n
\u201cBiden\u2019s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,\u201d Trump told the crowd. \u201cHe talks about democracy. He is a danger to democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s remarks come as he faces 91 charges across four criminal cases Two of those four cases relate to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Special counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with a \u201cconspiracy to defraud\u201d the United States, as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, seeking to portray the cases as politically motivated.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s speech marked a convergence of two of Trump\u2019s campaign strategies for the 2024 presidential race: seeking to turn the tables on Biden when it comes to anti-democracy attacks, and making immigration a central focus. Biden and Democrats have made the future of democracy a key part of their campaign against the former president amid reports and concern from historians that a second Trump term would be more authoritarian than his first.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s statement Saturday, first made in North Carolina and then reiterated at a rally in Richmond, was the latest in a long pattern of responding to attacks by leveling the same accusations against his opponents. On the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump attempted to use the term \u201cinsurrection\u201d against his political opponents, after he was impeached for the incitement of an insurrection but acquitted in the Senate.<\/p>\n
At his rally here, Trump continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election was \u201crigged.\u201d During the event at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex, his supporters waved signs that said \u201cToo Big to Rig\u201d \u2014 an effort to boost turnout ahead of Super Tuesday, when 15 states, including North Carolina, will hold their Republican nominating contests.<\/p>\n
During his speech, Trump again portrayed migrants as waging an \u201cinvasion\u201d and ramped up his use of the term \u201cmigrant crime.\u201d Most of those arrested at the southern border do not have criminal convictions, according to federal data, and experts say that most evidence indicates that undocumented immigrants do not cause more crime.<\/p>\n
In Richmond, Trump accused Democrats without evidence of encouraging migrants to enter the country illegally and \u201ctrying to sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.\u201d It is against the law for noncitizens to vote in a federal election, and registration of an ineligible voter is a federal crime.<\/p>\n
Immigration advocates have accused Trump of deploying racist rhetoric against migrants and say they fear it could inspire violence against the new arrivals. Among the migrants seeking entry at the southern border are record numbers of families traveling with children and underage migrants arriving without their parents.<\/p>\n
Trump and Biden made dueling visits to the southern border Thursday. Polls show that the border is a vulnerability for Biden in the November election. Under Biden, the number of people taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol has reached the highest levels in the agency\u2019s 100-year history, averaging 2 million per year.<\/p>\n
Trump has often spoken in exaggerated terms to describe migrants seeking to enter the country. In his North Carolina speech, Trump suggested that Biden was bringing in \u201cforeign armies.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why a central question in this election is whether the foreign armies Joe Biden has smuggled across our border will be allowed to stay, or whether they\u2019ll be told to get the hell out of here and go back home. We\u2019ll take them back home,\u201d he said to cheers.<\/p>\n
Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman, responded in a statement: \u201cOnce again Trump is projecting in an attempt to distract the American people from the fact he killed the fairest and toughest border security bill in decades because he believed it would help his campaign. Sad.\u201d<\/p>\n
During Biden\u2019s border visit to Brownsville, Tex., on Thursday, the president blamed Trump for killing a bipartisan border security deal in the Senate that tied border reforms to Ukraine aid. \u201cInstead of playing politics with this issue, join me \u2014 or I\u2019ll join you \u2014 in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill,\u201d Biden said. \u201cWe can do it together.\u201d<\/p>\n
The former president is on a glide path to the Republican nomination, which his campaign expects him to wrap up this month. During his speeches in North Carolina and Virginia, Trump barely mentioned his remaining primary opponent, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.<\/p>\n
Even as Trump touted his string of victories, the campaign events occasionally took on a dark tone. Ahead of Trump\u2019s speech in Richmond, an announcer said: \u201cLadies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages,\u201d before playing the song \u201cJustice for All,\u201d which features the \u201cJ6 Prison Choir\u201d as Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Trump has repeatedly used the word \u201chostages\u201d to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6 attack.<\/p>\n
During his Richmond speech, Trump described himself as a \u201cpolitical dissident.\u201d At one point, he appeared to mix up Biden and former president Barack Obama as he warned about impending war. Russian President Vladimir Putin \u201chas so little respect for Obama that he\u2019s starting to throw around the nuclear word,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
As he neared the end of his speech, Trump compared his opponents to domestic enemies, reiterating suggestions he\u2019s made that they pose a greater threat than foreign countries.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re taking on some of the most menacing forces and vicious opponents anywhere in the world, and our worst opponents are the people within the country,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Isaac Arnsdorf and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
GREENSBORO, N.C. \u2014 Donald Trump made a renewed attempt to turn criticism that he is a threat to democracy on its head, accusing President Biden without evidence of conspiring against the United States with his policies at the southern border. \u201cBiden\u2019s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1712,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}