Americans won’t fall for Democrats’ gaslighting on Vice President Kamala Harris’s border record, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) told Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater.
Marshall discussed the Democrats’ plan boldly broadcasted by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), one of the architects, along with Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) of the failed pro-migration border bill in early 2024.
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Murphy recently said Democrats “have to repeat this message over and over, but it’s a pretty simple message. Kamala Harris supported a tough, bipartisan border security bill that would have fixed most of the problems at the border, Donald Trump was for it until he realized it would actually solve the problem, and at the last minute, he instructed all of his allies in the Senate to vote against it, because he wants the border to be a mess.”
When pressed if that story will resonate now with voters in a way that it hasn’t for the last six months, Murphy insisted, “Well, all we can do is tell the truth. I can’t make up a story that’s not true, that the truth is that Republicans don’t support cleaning up and addressing the border — they showed that this last year — and Democrats do.”
Marshall explained the backstory of the doomed border bill and how Democrats such as Murphy are exploiting the crisis for electoral political gain.
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“We had James Lankford trying to work something, and it turned out to be a horrible bill. It was just that simple,” Marshall told Slater. “They kept it secret. They wouldn’t let us know what it was. I kept asking James, will this address asylum? Will it address parole? If it doesn’t address the asylum issue and address parole issue, then it’s nothing. That accounts for 80% of the illegal crossings: asylum and parole.”
“At the end of the day, the Democrats wouldn’t do it,” he lamented.
Marshall said voters won’t buy Democrats’ “smoke and mirrors” scheme in which they portray that Trump, whose policies led to a historic increase in border security that the Biden-Harris administration has squandered, is soft on the border.
“Look, Americans are smarter than this,” he said. “They realize under Donald Trump we had a secure border. Under Kamala Harris we do not have a secure border. This is all smoke and mirrors. That bill was smoke and mirrors. He would have done nothing. I actually will contend it would have made things worse.”
Marshall acknowledged he was “so upset with the way that the last chapter of that legislation, what happened,” admitting that in hindsight Lankford and Republicans were “set up for failure.”
“[Democrats] had 15, 20 people negotiating. We had one person (Lankford). I just got to tell you, what I have to do in a tough negotiation, I send in the meanest lawyer I can find, and several of them, right? They had all their experts in there. They had [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas stirring the pot.”
Without singling out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) or any other colleagues by name, Marshall placed the blame on leadership for engineering a negotiation that would lead to a failed outcome.
“Honestly, I’m going to go back and criticize Senate leadership for sending one person in to do the job,” he said. “It was an impossible situation for James, and I think his heart was in the right place.”
Marshall agreed with Slater’s assessment that Democrats knew the bill would not pass and set it up to fail to attain the talking point that Democrats support a strong border and Republicans don’t.
“It’s kind of like this debate situation,” he reasoned. “Kamala is trying to get out of the debate, but she wants it to look like it’s Trump’s fault, right? So they are good at this. They wake up in the morning with trickery, thinking of things that I never would have thought of.”
Slater compared that Democrat strategy with a similar one in which “they’re trying to run as to make it seem like Trump’s the incumbent,” such as when they blame the Biden-Harris Afghanistan disaster on Trump.
Marshall said “it’s in there in their DNA” for Democrats to blame others for their failures. “It’s part of their game plan. Again, I just don’t think that she can run from her record of this open border, her economic record, as well inflation. And still, at the end of the day, all this noise out there, I think that this election comes down to people who are concerned about the price of gasoline and groceries, and they’re concerned about the southern border.
The Kansas senator said he spent the past two weeks traveling throughout his state holding town halls and roundtables, and the concerns are clear.
“They’re concerned about the safety and security of their family,” he said. “They’re concerned about the price of gas and groceries. And despite some of those things that stabilize, what’s not coming down is the cost of rent, the cost of childcare, insurance is just through the roof.”
Marshall said Americans are suffering, but Trump’s vision of improving their lives will win the election.
“People have maxed their credit cards and now they’re not even living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “They’re living credit card to credit card. So, I really think that Democrats can make all the noise they want to, but that’s what it’s going to come down to: Secure the border, I’m going to make life affordable again.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
