Responding to Charlie Rose’s question on Trump’s ‘state of emergency’, Jordan said the white working class is being demonized and forced to pay more in taxes or sell themselves
John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, referred to Barack Obama as a “racist”. Michael Jordan, the former NBA great, claimed during his presidency that Obama was a Marxist.
And on Thursday night, Donald Trump supporter Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told a CBS News interviewer that an imminent crisis at the southern border has been fabricated by Democrats to distract from the “frightening” policies of the president.
“The president has come up with policies like the wall,” Jordan told CBS News’ Charlie Rose. “Some things on the border, as you know, have to be a border security issue, not a national security issue. But on a national security issue, he has presented the facts, and the facts are that our border is under threat.
“We have criminals, gangs, human traffickers, drug smugglers, and drug smugglers on our border, and what they do – we deal with border security. They have 1,100 drug-smuggling miles. Only people have traveled a larger distance for smuggling drugs?”
The $8.6bn bill that funding a southern border wall has already passed the House in a bipartisan fashion still needs Senate approval.
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Jordan, a Tea Party conservative who was strongly against the Affordable Care Act, opposed the extension of Medicaid under the law and has supported limiting legal immigration.
Speaking on Rose’s news show, CBS This Morning, Jordan said: “I don’t think you can mandate that a complete person has to come through some affirmative action program to pay taxes and to pay more on their taxes to fix that problem.
“Now, I know the white working class, they’re a little bit frightened, and they’re being demonized and forced to pay more.”
After he refused to say that he supported Trump’s power to declare a national emergency to fund the border wall, Rose observed that Jordan was going on the attack.
“But that’s what he’s saying,” Rose told Jordan. “That’s what he’s getting done.”
Jordan, a 36-year-old freshman member of Congress who calls himself a “social justice warrior”, refused to clarify further, saying: “I agree with the president on border security.”
Jordan said he thought that the president was a “true leader”.
“The president has offered a couple of times the DREAM Act,” Jordan said. “And the Democrats have blocked the bill. This is supposed to be about the citizens of the United States and what they need. But he’s not getting what he thinks he’s doing.”
Lee Thompson (@Lee_Thompson) This is an amazing moment from Jim Jordan. Thank you @CBSThisMorning for having him. He is brilliant and a key player in this ever-changing House GOP caucus. #WithCurtis #cbsnews pic.twitter.com/dgSKDz1vSU
Jordan’s comments are the latest example of Trump’s supporters trying to discredit his supposed enemies and alter voters’ perceptions on issues in time for the midterms.
Jordan argued that Democrats were trying to “criminalize the border” by making illegal immigration a scapegoat for failures in public education and the drug epidemic.
The frequent troubles along the US-Mexico border have fueled Trump’s calls for a security wall. Since he announced his presidential campaign, he has repeatedly said Mexican immigrants were committing crimes at “an incredible rate”, with most it claimed are undocumented. His opponents frequently point out that he did not cite statistics or evidence during his speech on 4 January, 2016.
Trump repeated this assertion in December, 2016, at the Decider summit of American white supremacists. He had earlier cited findings from the Center for Immigration Studies. But the study was discredited. The Center for Immigration Studies is funded by groups with various ties to anti-immigration movements.
His latest suggestion is likely to be backed by a new report from a conservative thinktank that claimed a border wall would save Americans $20bn.
This year’s midterms are set to be among the most bitter in decades. On Friday, the New York Times and Associated