As GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump tries in the closing weeks of his campaign to paint the purple state of North Carolina red, he spoke at a rally in Greenville with Senator Ted Budd (R-NC) present.
Budd is a tax-cut advocate in his first Senate term. He represented North Carolina’s 13th district in Congress during the second half of Trump’s presidency. In April of 2021, Budd consulted with Trump at Mar-a-Lago less than a week before he launched his Senate campaign — and he voted against every big Biden administration initiative, including the American Rescue Plan Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act
In North Carolina, pressing a border situation he has made his campaign’s top issue, Trump denied the claim that — for political reasons, i.e., to preserve a problem for Democrats — he had “killed” the bipartisan border bill earlier this year by urging MAGA lawmakers to reject it.
(The bill contained $20+ billion to strengthen border security and stop the flow of fentanyl and other narcotics at the border, and a provision that the DHS Secretary could automatically shut down the border when migrant encounters reached 4,000 in any week’s time.)
Trump: They say I told Republicans to kill the bipartisan border security bill. I sort of like that. No one has had power like that in a long time pic.twitter.com/LNk7dX6QQ4
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 21, 2024
Denying the claim directly in his speech, Trump said Democrats claim “Oh no, Trump stopped the bill, he told the Senate.”
Trump then turned to Sen. Budd and asked, “Ted did I ever tell you not to sign that bill? No, right? I didn’t tell anybody.”
Trump’s denial runs counter to inside accounts from Republicans who have made it clear that Trump engineered the bill’s defeat. (After putting Budd on the spot, Trump answered the question for the Senator. But even Budd’s corroboration on not being asked doesn’t, of course, mean that Trump was unable to get Budd a message.)
Sen. James Lankford (R-IL), who negotiated that bill with Democrats, has said in frustration that Trump had killed it. Lankford admitted that fellow lawmakers and GOP influencers told him that it was “the wrong time to solve this problem.” (He also said he was threatened.)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who spoke of the bill’s merits, also recently admitted Trump killed the bill, though he said essentially the same thing at the time — citing Speaker Mike Johnson‘s vow to stonewall it in the House. See below.
[NOTE: Trump has made a surge in migration during the Biden administration and ongoing challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border his #1 campaign issue, repeatedly telling his followers that migrants “poison the blood” of the U.S, eat family pets, and take jobs and funds away from American citizens.]
Democrats have defended the situation at the border by repeatedly claiming, as Lankford did, that Republicans deliberately killed the solution, in a case of a political gamesmanship.
Lankford recently took the Senate floor to emphasize that Vice President Kamala Harris had no direct input in the 4-month negotiations that produced the bill, though the Biden-Harris White House was a part of the negotiations, as a press release from February demonstrates.
Lankford’s speech is below.