Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina really wanted to jump on the border train of harping on Joe Biden’s policies. But his methods were less than savory when he tried to go after the president.
Most conservatives have been blaming Biden for an increase in entries among undocumented immigrants. But everything Biden has tried to do to stem the tide has been rebuffed by the GOP.
They even wrote their OWN bill, then — at the behest of Donald Trump — shot down the very bill that they wrote, just to deny Biden a victory.
After all, if the problem gets solved, that’s one less thing for Trump to use in his campaign against Biden.
But talking about the problem is one thing. Lying about it is something else entirely.
Edwards posted a photo to X, formerly Twitter, depicting a migrant caravan headed to the United States. Over the top of it, he pasted a popular meme of a picture of Biden and the caption “I Did That!”
The problem is, Biden didn’t do that. Biden wasn’t even in government when that picture was taken, in fact.
This is a photo from 2018 when Donald Trump was president. pic.twitter.com/683tD6DSpb [1]
— Josh Schwerin (@JoshSchwerin) February 13, 2024 [2]
But as you can see, “Community Notes,” the feature on the website that allows readers to correct something or add context to an inflammatory post, jumped right on the case:
It was Josh Schwerin, the founder of communications firm Saratoga Strategies, who fact-checked Edwards. He even posted a second photo on the thread of the same group from a different angle — but clearly from the same caravan.
Contrary to what Edwards was attempting to claim, that was a particularly bad time — for Trump — on the border. Encounters in 2019 of illegal crossings were higher than any single year during his predecessor’s 8-year term.
As the AP photo caption notes Trump cut off hundreds of millions in aid to Central America, which sparked serious instability. And after COVID, which Trump bungled in a historic way, encounters jumped back up due to the instability that caused.
Basically, the takeaway here is that Republicans stand for nothing, and they lie about everything. Even the easily fact-checked.