GOP Hypocrisy

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Says That ‘Everything Biden Touches is Ruined’

During an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters, Sarah Huckabee Sanders had nothing complimentary to say about President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. Sanders, the former White House press secretary for the Trump administration and current GOP gubernatorial candidate for Virginia managed to say a bunch of things that were mostly evidence-free.

But I think many of us have come to expect that from anyone in the Trump administration after so many lies and distortions of the truth.

The interview began with Watters asking Sanders about her thoughts on the seeming tension between Biden and Harris, Joe.My.God. reports.

“No offense to anybody, but I wouldn’t want to have lunch with either one of them [Biden and Harris],” Sanders responded.

“And I think it’s no surprise at all that the tensions are high, when every single thing that you are responsible for and working on is falling apart, whether it is record-high crime, whether it’s the crisis at the border, whether it’s inflation.”

“Everything these two touch, they destroy,” Sanders said. “In fact, it seems to be the only thing they’re in sync on, is that whatever they’re working on, they destroy it.”

Joe.My.God. concluded the article with “Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the country’s third most famous liar, last night on Fox News.” I’m assuming they mean in the Trump administration, and as the Washington Post has famously pointed out, her former boss is famous for a dazzling array of whoppers.

Since Sanders provided no evidence for her claims during the interview, I decided it was time for a fact check. I decided to focus on the topics she mentioned: Crime, the border, and inflation.

  • On crime: Sanders is correct. Sort of. According to a January 21, 2021 report from The Washington Post, homicide rates in the country are skyrocketing.

Writing for the Post, Griff Witte notes:

“The past two years have been dreadful for public safety in U.S. cities as the homicide rate numbers soared — in some cases to record levels. Experts say a constellation of factors is to blame, including the coronavirus pandemic’s scars and a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they serve during the social unrest of 2020.”

Quite obviously, since some of these factors go back to 2020, before Biden’s presidency, perhaps it’s best to rethink whether the Trump administration had any role in this problem. Just sayin.’

The homicide rate in the U.S. suffered its largest spike in the 199os, so as it stands, the current rate is well below that, but murders jumped to 21,570 nationwide in 2020, which is nearly 5000 more than the previous year, according to FBI data.

The situation for 2021 isn’t any rosier either. CBS News reports there was a definite uptick of homicides in major U.S. cities in 2021, “with a five percent increase and a 44 percent increase from 2019. That’s according to a January study of crime trends released by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ).

“The study drew on crime data from 22 cities nationwide — including Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Memphis, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia — and found an additional 28 murders last year, compared to 2020,” CBS News reports. ” And while the overall increase in the homicide rate slowed, murder rates in St. Petersburg, Florida (108 percent) and Austin (86 percent) skyrocked, while Washington, D.C. also recorded a notable increase.”

Experts attribute much of the higher homicide rates to the pandemic and changes in policing tactics. Even so, the news is not all bad.

“Despite the recent increase, murder rates have dropped considerably across the United States since the 1990s. The 22 cities included in the study recorded roughly half the murders documented 29 years ago — 15 deaths per 100,000 in 2021 versus 28 per 100,000 in 1993.”

So Sanders has a partial point here.

  • The border. According to the Migration Policy Institute, even though former President Trump gets a great deal of credit for being the most active on immigration issues, Biden’s administration has far outpaced him regarding the number of executive actions taken during his first year in office.

“Yet the Biden administration’s pace of change has gone largely unnoticed, with immigrants rights activists accusing it of going too slowly to unravel Trump actions and conservatives harshly critical of what they see as inattention to rising flows at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

That’s not all the institution noted.

“The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) logged 296 executive actions on immigration taken by the administration as of January 19—one day before Biden’s first anniversary in office. By contrast, the Trump administration carried out 86 executive actions during its first year and 472 over its four-year term, MPI analysts have found.”

The border situation is still a giant mess but the Biden administration has “advanced or changed policies in ways that have significant impact on humanitarian protection, immigration enforcement, and legal immigration, touching the lives of large numbers of immigrants. These actions cut a wide spectrum—from greatly narrowing the number of unauthorized immigrants vulnerable to arrest, detention, and removal; lifting some barriers to U.S. entry and to accessing immigration benefits; and in the humanitarian protection realm, extending eligibility for temporary protection to an additional 430,000 immigrants, raising the refugee resettlement ceiling to 125,000, and proposing a restructuring of the asylum system at the southwest border.”

So Sarah can just can it with her comments on Biden failing on border issues.

  • Inflation. Sanders gets a gold star here. The administration is definitely struggling with inflation. Anyone purchasing gas in the U.S. is definitely discovering this, and Politifact, examining a statement by U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Green Bay) found his comments to be true.

What did Gallagher say?

“Inflation has gone up every month of the Biden and just hit another 40-year high,” he said in a press release on April 22.

Politifact rated the statement as mostly true. And once again, COVID is at least partly to blame. But, it began rising under Trump and I’m going to refer you to the Politifact article to gain better insight on this.

So this time around, Sanders has been somewhat truthful during an interview but that hasn’t always been the truth. She learned a few too many bad habits from her former boss. She’s told her share of whoppers in the past and she’s probably still doing so.

Here’s Huckabee Sanders’s interview below.

meet the author

Megan has lived in California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida and she currently lives in Central America. Living in these places has informed her writing on politics, science, and history. She is currently owned by 15 cats and 3 dogs and regularly owns Trump supporters when she has the opportunity. She can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GaiaLibra and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/politicalsaurus

Comments

Comments are currently closed.