‘Trump is Not Wrong!’ Morning Joe Highlights Damning Chart of Immigration Spike Over Last Four Years Under Biden
Morning Joe contributor Steve Rattner underplayed the ill effects of the Biden Administration’s border policy Thursday morning, though the chart he presented very clearly told a damning story.
Rattner serves as the Economic Analyst on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and is a contributing writer to The New York Times Op Ed page where he recently published a compilation of charts that break down the most significant events of 2024 in a “Year in Charts” essay.
Given the election of the past year, Rattner opened with a rather glowing review of the current state of the US economy, to which Morning Joe host Jonathan Lemire opined how Trump inherited a strong economy from President Barack Obama and “now he’s doing it again from Joe Biden, who did oversee a lot of growth.”
The segment became less laudatory of Biden as it progressed to immigration, to which Rattner was remarkably kind to the Biden administration, though the data shows something more disastrous.
“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” Ratner opened. Pointing to his chart, he said, “You can see what happened here. And Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings work quite low. They’re running about 74,000 a month when he left office and they, in fact, did shoot up.”
“Some of it was some things Biden said and some ways that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations,” Rattner explained. “But in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month. But what maybe people don’t entirely know is that border crossings have come back down almost to where they were under Trump. They’re running at about 100,000 at the moment. So we went up the hill and we went down the hill. But unfortunately, that was pretty costly to Biden during the election.”
Morning Joe gave little attention to a massive increase in illegal border crossings during the Biden administration and spent much of its precious airtime arguing how Trump posed a fascist and authoritarian threat to the nation if he were to be reelected. And to be fair, some of that commentary was justified.
So it’s notable to see an economic expert like Rattner talk about border policies and the then-former president’s rhetoric, saying that “Trump is not wrong.”
Watch above via MSNBC.