Since Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw from American public life at the end of his term, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies have focused on their new opponent’s subpar performance handling border security. The GOP’s strategy makes sense. For all the media’s efforts to revise or even erase history, Harris was, in function if not title, the Biden administration’s “border czar.” And yet, the Republican Party’s approach to this messaging campaign has so far been to frame Harris as a fully empowered functionary who nevertheless bungled her charge. In reality, the Biden administration set Harris up to fail, as a way of providing the president cover for his own dismal mishandling of the border.
It was only two months after Biden’s inauguration, with all Trump’s Covid-era restrictions still in place, that encounters between migrants and patrol agents exploded at the U.S.–Mexico border, soon to eclipse even their pre-pandemic highs. That same month, the president tapped his vice president not to bring the crisis under control but to take the blame for it.
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