So he can say “I alone can fix it.”
The Republicans have a problem. They had hoped to rope in Independents and GOP moderates by insisting that the economy is so bad that America simply must elect a Republican to fix it. it’s worked in the past at times but the reality is that Democrats tend to fix the economy after Republicans break it and in this case it’s not looking like it’s going to be a winning electoral issue for them;. So they’re banking on the border, one of their perennial scaremongering tactics to get them over the line this time.
Trump is saying it out loud:
This bill is actually a very Republican friendly bill without any concessions to the Democrats which will make it a no-go among many of them. And we know they want the issue for the election. But as Greg Sargent points out, there is more to it than that:
I think it’s no accident that Trump and MAGA are trying to sink this deal even as Trump and Miller are loudly advertising plans for an extraordinarily cruel and draconian second-term crackdown. This includes the mass removals of millions of undocumented immigrants settled here, commencing on Day One; and dramatically scaled up “camps” to detain enormous amounts of asylum-seekers, who would be subject to appalling new limits that would go farther than the GOP bill does. Trump is openly flaunting this agenda’s white nationalist aspirations.
The spectacle of border disorder along with Congress doing nothing in response is the essential combination that Trump, Miller, and MAGA Republicans need. Images of serious destabilization being met with parliamentary sclerosis might create the opening for them to persuade swing voters—especially those who aren’t ideologically opposed to immigration—to accept maximal ethnonationalist savagery, packaged as “border security,” as the only “solution” that will “work.”
The last thing you want is for those swing voters to see that you don’t need to open up concentration camps to get the border under control or that Biden is able to pass bipartisan legislation. That would be bad. So they absolutely need to show the congress as totally impotent to solve the problem so they can sell his strongman act as the only answer. It’s diabolical.