Trump says US is ‘sick in elections and it’s sick on the border’ during Texas visit

The president took time out of an immigration-focused trip to the border to talk about ‘make believe votes’ in New York’s mayoral race and his own 2020 loss

Texas governor Greg Abbott introduces former president Donald Trump at a meeting about the border (Screen grab)

Donald Trump complained about the “sick” state of the US-Mexico border and the American election system during his ongoing trip to South Texas.

“We have a sick country,” the former president said, recounting once again his dubious version of the 2020 election. “It’s sick in elections, and it’s sick on the border.”

During remarks before a crowd including border-area law enforcement officials and Texas governor Greg Abbott on Wednesday, the former president touched on the border, but mostly fell back on favoured tangents about the Russia investigation, how many more votes he got in 2020 than in 2016, how much smarter and healthier he is than Joe Biden, and the mayoral race for New York City.

In Mr Trump’s hometown of New York, there actually have been the kind of election irregularities he falsely claimed occurred in the states and cities he lost during the 2020 election.

On Tuesday, the City Board of Elections first said that former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia was closing in on frontrunner Eric Adams in the ranked-choice election for the Democratic mayoral primary, which in blue NYC is the main event. Then, later that day, the board acknowledged a “discrepancy” in its results, revealing it had mistakenly included 135,000 test votes in its initial results, prompting a recount.

“If you don’t have strong elections, and you don’t have strong borders, you don’t have a country,” Mr Trump went on, mocking the city for including “make-believe votes”.

The ex-president also vastly overstated his immigration record during the event.

“We had it down to really a science,” he said. “People just weren’t getting in, unless they were getting in legally,” adding boasts about building a border wall that was “not penetrable” and the claim that “we stopped” human trafficking.

Simply put, none of this is true. Immigration fluctuated up and down throughout the Trump years, and experts say the wall, once it was clear it wouldn’t be completed, had little discernible effect on overall migration flows besides vastly increasing the number of border-crossers who died in the middle of the desert, as The Independentreported last fall.