Biden’s rage and crapulence, staff’s cowardice and ignorance, all worsened border crisis

Is embattled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas leaking to Axios now?

That’s my opinion, but more about that in a minute.

Axios reports that Joe Biden’s White House was a complete clown show on the matter of the border crisis, with Joe himself blowing up at staff over impossible things, staff oozily doing all they could to cravenly pass the problem onto some other guy, and some of them with decision-making power flamingly ignorant and incompetent.

The idiocy worsened the border crisis, Axios argued. The title of their piece is “How Biden Botched the Border.”

It’s an exclusive scoop, and it starts like this:

Aboard Air Force One en route to tour the southern border in January 2023, President Biden sat at the head of his conference table and exploded with fury.

• The president lit into his team, which included then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O’Malley Dillon, Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall and other immigration officials. He demanded obscure immigration data points — and vented when his staff didn’t have them handy.

Why it matters: The previously unreported meeting, recounted to Axios by three people familiar with the events, is emblematic of the Biden administration’s struggle with the border crisis during the past three years — infighting, blame-shifting and indecision.

• Biden’s fury subsided, and aides scrambled for the information he wanted. People in the meeting later told others in frustration that his winding process and irritability were making it more difficult to reach decisions about the border.

What a jackass. Any questions about his fitness to lead the United States? Senile or not, someone like that is no leader and obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing. Other reports have stated that he took his marching orders solely from open-borders activists.

As far as White House staff go, it was a nest of stinking, slinking, weasels.

• The idea that no one wanted to “own it” came up repeatedly in interviews about the border crisis. But the problem required a robust and coordinated response at several levels of the federal government.

…and…

• “There are definite incentives … to not be the person who owns the scary issue with no solutions,” a former government official close to the issue told Axios.

Kamala Harris was particularly craven:

• Vice President Kamala Harris and her office made clear to others in the administration that her responsibilities began and ended with the factors driving people to leave Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the issue Biden had assigned her to examine.
• As the migration became more global, Harris’ team remained focused on the Northern Triangle and Mexico.

Not my circus, not my monkey.

Meanwhile, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan turned his end of the migration crisis over to someone named Liz Sherwood-Randall whose title was Homeland Security advisor, and who was so ignorant about the matter she didn’t know the difference between an asylum-seeker and a refugee. Rather than cover her tracks by secretly googling the difference, she asked staff to prepare a briefing for her on this Wikipedia-level matter.

There was finger-pointing at the Department of State for “dragging its feet” on migrant intake centers in countries of origin, which is baloney, and State rightly denied it because we have been following this issue, and there was constant staff turnover since everyone knew it was a mess and nobody wanted to have their name on it. They fought with each other, with some clearly cognizant of what was happening and others in the throes of the open-borders activists who obviously have a monetary interest in perpetuating the crisis.

Susan Rice eventually ended up running the mess, and she bickered and fought with Sherwood-Randall and Harris, as well as connived against sleazy Housing and Urban Development Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who never bothered to do his job at all on migrant housing. According to the report, she called him a “bitch-ass” and an “idiot” in private. When Rice left her post, she was replaced by another viper, Neera Tanden who paid little attention to the matter.

One guy who comes out smelling like a rose here in all this organizational sewage is Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who famously assured us all through this White House infighting that “The border is secure.” He repeated that talking point from at least March 2021, two months into Biden’s presidency. 

It makes me suspect he is the primary leaker of the story to Axios.

The Axios report claims that Mayorkas was Mister Responsible here, being against Biden’s early executive order putting a 100-day moratorium on migrant deportations to start.

Really? Sounds a little convenient for him at this juncture with a second congressional impeachment on him.

That sure as heck wasn’t his story when he was out assuring the public that the border was “secure,” there was no border crisis, and oh, he was against Biden’s halt on deportations. It’s at odds with his current behavior, shielding more than a million deportable illegal aliens from deportation right now. He could deport them … and won’t.

Color me skeptical that he was against any Biden moratorium on deportations.

There’s also a laughable claim in the Axios report that the Bidenites muzzled Mayorkas from speaking to the press and allowed Biden’s opponents to define the issue. Really? A Google search shows that he was talking all the time, constantly defending the indefensible to the point where he seemed as though he lived on another planet. His own Border Patrol grew to hate him in these years, too, back when he was out hanging them out to dry in the press. As for opponents defining the issue, did he notice the 2022 election midterms, when much of always-blue southern Texas counties flipped red? Did he think that was GOP campaign prowess or television ads? He must have missed the detail about voters feeling the actual lived effects of open borders.

Give us a break.

The worst of it is when Axios excuses him from the entire border crisis, claiming the whole thing was out of anyone’s control, a global phenomenon:

Reality check: Much of the current crisis is rooted in factors Biden’s team has had little control over — including unprecedented global calamities that have pushed millions of migrants to the U.S., decades of congressional inaction, and the state of key agencies after the Trump administration.

• Many current and former Biden officials say they believe they’ve done their best considering the circumstances. But others told Axios they think the administration has fallen far short on matters within its control.

This is pure fiction-writing. What global calamities explain migrants from Congo and China and Togo and Mexico and India and more than 100 other countries from flooding on in? Are they all in calamities? Or did Joe Biden invite them on in, which is what the presidents of Mexico and Guatemala have openly stated. Funny how all the “calamities” they claim weren’t there when President Trump was in office, and they only started when Joe Biden took the helm.

It’s ridiculous.

But it is … what Mayorkas has been saying for a while in all those supposedly muzzled press appearances. That’s his talking point, something he has been claiming since 2023, according to this recent gushing Associated Press piece:

Mayorkas sat down with Arulanantham nearly a year ago for what at times was a contentious interview. Arulanantham pressed him on issues such as the treatment of children in the immigration court system and policies on asylum. But, Arulanantham said, he did not doubt that Mayorkas would speak to him again if he asked.

Mayorkas and many immigration experts argue that what is happening on the southern border is part of a global phenomenon where people around the world, aided by social media and smugglers, are more likely to move in search of a better life. 

That’s his talking point for weaseling out of responsibility for his own role in enabling millions of unvetted illegal migrants into the U.S. 

Yep, the global phenomenon did it, as if the curious pause in wild migration numbers between the hordes invading Europe on Angela Merkel’s watch, and the hordes invading the U.S. on Biden’s watch, during President Trump’s administration didn’t happen.

That Axios has laid that out that ridiculous claim as if it were a newsroom fact now pretty well suggests that they are in Mayorkas’ tree. 

Obviously, Mayorkas has become the designated fall guy at Joe Biden’s chaos-filled White House and now faces his second impeachment in Congress as the process ramps up again. Nobody from the Biden…