 Soha. Welcome to American Issues Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And today's topic and title is, GOP Demands Border Fix, but Missing in Action for Solution. We all know that Ukraine's funding has been tied by the hip for this border legislation that's pending in the Senate. Time of the essence. Ukraine needs help now. They need funding now. They need weapons now. And things are stalling. And what I'm stalling is negotiations between the Democrats and the Republicans. Not so much immigration solutions or reform, but more border control issues. And the word is, although we haven't seen the details, is that there are some very, very large changes in border control that we haven't seen in maybe 10, 15, 20 years coming from the Democrats. So this is a monumental proposal that's negotiated. And unfortunately, Donald Trump has decided that he has no interest in any solution as it pertains to border control. So to talk about that discussion I have with me, my co-host Jay Fidel and our special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton. Good afternoon. Good morning, Tim. Jay. Chuck. Jay, I'm going to start with you. You know, I think Joe Biden's interest in being drawn to the table on border control and probably giving concessions that he never would have thought of doing. But he's almost in a corner because he has to get funding started for Ukraine. Here is Joe Biden doing his best. And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, says any bill coming from the Senate is dead on arrival. Dead on arrival in the House of Representatives. What's your take on number one, Joe Biden capitulating as much as he is on some of these proposals, although we don't know all the details. And Donald Trump opining the last minute, or certainly on Thursday, that he's not interested in a solution. Your thoughts? Reminds me of Ron Moon, bless his memory. Ron Moon was a great settlement judge. And if you negotiated a settlement in front of Ron Moon, and he said to you, go back, talk to your client, get a sorority. And you went back to your client, and your client refused to give you a sorority. Ron Moon would put you in his black book. And that meant your credibility was destroyed. If you come in there, you'd better have a sorority to begin with. I think what happened here is Trump gave Johnson authority to enter into that agreement in the first place. But then either A, he changed his mind. That's probably far for the course for him, because he doesn't care about the consequences of what he does. Or B, he intended at the outset to change his mind. And he was just going to screw everybody in the room by undoing what they had done. And so you make an agreement. You make it with Trump's approval behind the scenes, and then Trump withdraws the approval, because all he wants to do is hurt Joe Biden in the election. That's all he wants to do. And that's why he's also manipulating this Pony Baloney impeachment of the Homeland Security team. That's the same thing. And what's more interesting than all of that is he admits it. He admits that's what he's doing. And my bottom line on that is what kind of fool would go along with a guy who admits his bad face. The base probably knows as much as we do about it, but the base goes along, or maybe not. Some of the people at the fringes are not going along. He's got some breakaways among the Republicans now saying, what kind of business is this where all you do is you manipulate people in order to improve your own chances in the election and the hell with the country? So I think that's what's happened. That's the reality of it. And I believe that Trump has gone abridged too far. Well, are we surprised? I mean, how many times in the past when he was president did he do the exact same thing? In fact, I think early on it was with John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They had negotiated a pretty solid immigration package, and Donald Trump got cold feet. That was the first time. And he let them all down the path. And then he said, no, I'm not interested in it. So why are we surprised, or should we be surprised, or should Mike Johnson be surprised that Donald Trump let them down the path of interest and negotiate something in a major change that the Republicans would love to see as far as border control? And yet Donald Trump says, no, I'm not interested now. Should they trust Donald Trump anymore? Or is it like Lucy and Charlie Brown in a football where time and time again the football is picked up and removed? Oh, the joke about the animals crossing the river and one attacks the other. And it's why you're attacking me. I'm helping you cross the river because it's my nature. We know what Trump's nature is. And what makes it worse, as I mentioned, is that he's announced this. He's told everybody, how can you justify this under any system? And I think Johnson looks terrible. Republicans look terrible. And Trump looks awful terrible. And it's all out in the open now. So all he's doing at every level, who cares about immigration? Who cares about policy? Who cares about the interests of the country? Who cares about that? It's Trump wants to win in this election. It's just another dirty trick, a combination of dirty tricks. So I think they all know it and they're all embarrassed by it, but they'll never say so because for the most part, they're still loyal and faithful to him. Okay, Jay, thank you. Hey, Chuck, to what degree has Donald Trump damaged the GOP? Again, they've already been damaged because 20 of them are mega GOP. But to what degree has he led them down the path and pushed them in a corner and have left them standing there looking stupid? Well, on a scale of one to 10, I'd say probably 19. But you have to remember, and Jay is right, number one, I mean, come on, Biden, Democrats, get real, you cannot bargain with a narcissist. It's not humanly possible because there are no morals. There's no values. There are no limits. Every single deal is an invitation to bargain. They simply cannot bargain. The question for Biden and the Democrats to the GOP is, are you going to bring somebody to the table who can make and will honor a deal other than Donald Trump? If the answer to that is no, there can be no bargain. There simply cannot. I mean, it literally is that simple. So that's the sine qua non, all right? If the Democrats were to take that, and you can see that historically because the former speaker, why would ever give somebody named McCarthy a position of political power in this country? I have no idea. But obviously, somebody has no sense of history, but they did. McCarthy actually honored the deal he made, which got him kicked out. Johnson, who has absolutely no spine at all, he doesn't. Because if Trump says back out, he backs out. So the question for the Democrats, again, is to the Republicans, can you bring someone to the table who can make a deal and live with the deal, honor the deal, enforce the deal, other than Donald Trump? That's a yes, no question. So if you're a Republican in the Senate, and you've put your, you know, you've got in front of the cameras on Fox and CNN, and you say that you're supporting real, measurable border control, probably the most monumental in 20, 20 years or more, and that you've put, you've staked that territory out. What's the incentive for you to continue with that support, knowing full well that Mike Johnson is going to kill the bill as a dead on arrival? Does that put you in a position that now you, you, you bear the wrath of one Donald Trump and two his mega followers? No, because if you're Republican, the only thing you need is access to the donors. You really don't care about the voters or the issues or anything that relates to your responsibility as an elected representative. Help with that stuff, right? That doesn't matter. What matters is the donors that are going to get you reelected. Because if they're stupid enough to put you and Trump and Johnson and people like that they're in the first place, and if there are enough of them to get away with doing it in enough rural areas that they can outnumber the cities in certain areas, then they will continue that. That's the system, right? Manipulate the system so that only those who don't think will vote, and they will vote for the people who will not represent or advocate for them, but who will simply serve their donors. And it's a pure power-based. It's a zero-sum mentality. That's the choice. If the Democrats had any intelligence at all, and that question remains to be determined, their campaign would campaign would simply be on every issue. You have two choices. This is their choice. This is our choice. When you go into the booth, we will send you something where you can carry it in with you and look at what your choices are, and you decide. Whatever you decide is fine, but understand you're making a choice between these two choices on education, healthcare, housing, environment, governance, everything else. That's the deal. You think Joe Biden was a little crafter than we give him credit for? That he knew full well that Donald Trump was going to put the kibosh on this negotiation, and that's why they went forward to basically put the GOP in a corner and make him look bad? Is that a potential thing that took place here? No, I think it's an indirect result, but I think the problem is Joe Biden has not done what in his 40-plus years in Washington he always did best. He did not assemble a team and an alliance to maximize the prospects of enforceability of his deal and his ability to make an enforceability. Why he didn't do that in this particular situation is discouraging, disheartening, and disappointing because there really is no one else lined up with him, not Shiv, not any of those guys. Nobody is with him. There's no team. There's no there, there. You can't bargain like that, and Trump knows it. I mean, Trump is stupid, but he's not stupid in a way that serves the Democrats and Biden's interests because his base is even more stupid, and they'll do whatever he wants, including Johnson and the Mago Republicans. They're not capable of critical thought or thoughtful action. Okay, I'd like to add something. If you want to know what I really think, you can ask me. Don't hold back, Chuck. I know you're holding back. Hey, Jay, let's go out over the diving board, and I know there's no water in the pool, but let's do it. We know that the Ukraine funding is tied to this issue. I don't know if there's any way of breaking that loose at this point, but it's tied. The question is, we saw Donald Trump in Helsinki, we saw Donald Trump in his administration for four years prior to his election as president. His love and admiration for Vladimir Putin, and it seems to me that Vladimir Putin has some influence over Donald Trump. We haven't been able to prove that wholeheartedly, but it appears that way, and it has appeared that way. To what degree, has Donald Trump trying to discourage funding for Ukraine and is opposed to this border fix? Yeah, Putin is in the room here. He's in the room with Trump and Johnson and Biden. He's involved in this deal or no deal. Would most Americans believe that? No, no, because Trump has made huge efforts to keep it out of the press, going back to Kim Comey and all that. All he wanted to do is separate himself from Putin, but it's so obvious that he was, I don't want to say infatuated, I would say indebted to Putin. Like, for example, I still believe that substantial parts, at least substantial parts of the Steele dossier are true, and Putin has come from that on him. And Trump owes Putin, he is indebted to him, and so that's why they seem to be close. But I don't think most of the country really knows that and factors it in. And I would say that Biden automated himself in these negotiations by believing he would look good as a negotiator. That's his, what, how many years in the Senate? That's his thing. I negotiate with all parties. I'm always seeking mutual agreement and bilateral results. I'm always doing that. And he tried to do that here. And I think he didn't realize that Trump was in the room and Putin was in the room. And actually, Johnson is an acolyte. Member Johnson was part of the insurrection committee. He was one of the players, one of the organizers of that committee. He is completely tied to Trump. Trump controls him. It's like he's a factor. That's all he is. And you can expect he's going to dance like a marionette for whatever Trump wants. So I think at the end of the day, Biden was making too many assumptions about honesty on the part of Johnson. Johnson looks like a nice fellow, doesn't he? But he's just Trump. You have to paint Trump's face on him. And I think Biden made a mistake in that regard. And I think Biden's proper response to it would be, are you kidding me? We just sat down and made a deal. I spent weeks with you. We made a deal. We laid it on the table, man to man, and now you're backing out. And then we have Trump coming in from the side and he's saying you, he made you back out. What kind of man are you, Johnson? And what kind of man are you, Trump? You're not in office. Why are you trying to manipulate everybody in Congress? How can we function this way? I don't think that Biden ever said that in public. He had a great opportunity to say that, to attack them both. And that's one of his weaknesses also. He should have attacked them both. He still can't. If he's listening today, and he should take note, this is a great opportunity to lay it on the two of them. And going forward, I agree with Chuck. Biden has got to say, look, here's my position. It's better. You should vote for me. Now, his campaign is about to start in earnest. This is what he ought to do. It's not just the pros and cons sheet in the option sheet that the voter takes into the voting booth. It's the rhetoric. Biden has got to get up there and say, look, this is what I stand for. I'll give you details. And this is what Trump stands for. I'll give you details. And really, if you want to preserve your own quality of life, you should vote for me. He's got to say that. And he's got to say it in strong and strident terms on every issue. He's got 10 months to educate the public, which he has not yet done. Well, particularly when it comes to border control, or the lack thereof, I mean, there's 11,000 crossings per day, most of them not authorized. To what degree does Joe Biden use executive authority to try to stem the flow? I mean, he tried some of that. Particularly, I'm thinking of Title 42, which was the COVID authority. But then the Supreme Court basically said, that's over now. You don't get to use Title 42. So what arrows in Joe Biden's quiver does he have to do something about what is every day you see is bad press. The visuals alone are bad press. What does Joe Biden do about it? He explains it. He says, why? And he points out, as Heather Cox Richardson did in her newsletter last evening, he points out that the problem was much worse when Trump was in office. The number of people coming over the border illegally was much greater when Trump was in office. It doesn't lie in Trump's mouth to complain now. It doesn't lie in his mouth to attack Biden on this, or to attack the homeland security. But don't people expect action, not figure pointing? Well, what he's got to do is explain what he has done, what he has not done, what he has waited for in Congress, why Congressional support is critical to his program, and reinforce the notion that the Republicans are merely trying to embarrass him, and that if he had a chance... Well, they're doing a good job. Because he hasn't been responding. The public doesn't know what he has been doing, what he has tried to do, what he needs from Congress, and how he would make that work better. I think the public is not educated, and Biden needs to educate them about all of this, including the fact that Trump did a terrible job when he was in office, much worse. Okay, thank you. Chuck, getting back to what Joe Biden can do or can't do legally, but as an executive power, is there anything preventing President Biden to talk with Mexico and Blinken, which I think Blinken has done, to say, hey, our problem isn't at the Mexican U.S. border. Our problem is at the Mexican Guatemalan border, which is a much, much smaller piece of land and border to control. To what degree is Joe Biden and his administration missing that critical element to stem the flow of immigration, either unlawfully or lawfully, at that border point? It's a great question. Before getting to it, I think Jay's raised something that we really need to understand. If Joe Biden and the Democrats want to really present the information on the border effectively and persuasively in a way that's going to benefit them in the 2024 elections, get a border security guy, one of the people up there, and get somebody who's honest and who will tell you there are more than three times the number of people coming now than then. That's not disputable. The same percentage of them, about 78, 80 percent, has remained that entire period. We are stopping the same percentage of those people that Trump did, but the number because it's tripled. If you're looking at sheer numbers, the sheer numbers are greater. That's where we need to concentrate. And in order for that to happen, for us to be able to deal with three times as many people, we need Congress to give us more money, more officers, more enforcement resources. That's the problem. If Biden would respond by saying the problem is with Congress, they are not authorizing sufficient resources, human and other, to counter that three times as many influx, that's the problem. If those guys want to fish and moan about political stuff until heck freezes over, that's fine. But unless and until somebody puts enough people and resources out there to stem that flow, it's not going to improve. That's Congress's problem. It's not good point. And to what degree does that, once again, Donald Trump ties and hamstrings the president of the United States. He's not going to get those resources. So I go to my point is what other executive actions can Joe Biden do to show the American public that both Democrat, Republican and independence are highly concerned about this issue down at the border? What executive actions can Joe Biden do that doesn't require a lot of funds from Congress? Okay, that's a perfect question. And that's exactly why what Jay said and what we just talked about leads to that. Because what Joe Biden can do, and Trump did a lot of it, including on his border wall, take money from other places, take money from the defense budgets and National Guard, send people down there say, look, this is Congress's responsibility. They are advocating it. They are creating this problem by not providing adequate resources. I'm going to use the maximum of my executive ability to provide those resources. But until Congress fixes both the resources and the immigration process and laws, we're not going to be able to effectively stand that time because we can arrest those people. We can even find ways without congressional money to put them in places, but we can't do that adequately unless and until Congress provides the funding and the resources to be able to manage that triple influx. We will do what we can executive, but we're limited. The money and the resources to do it are entirely up to Congress. Is it President Biden losing the PR war on border control? He has lost it. Yeah, he's lost it. He's lost the war on border control. And, you know, Chuck, I absolutely agree with the notion and Tim of taking money from other places and bringing the, you know, the army down there. I don't think he had, I don't think Joe Biden has much control over the National Guard anymore. It's harder for him to federalize the National Guard when we're having a civil war with so many states, secessionist states, if you will. But the problem is, if he brings the army down there, Trump's obvious retort to that is why didn't you do this earlier? You waited for me to criticize you, and now you're doing it. You're a little late. So, I mean, it's an option which has a certain risk of blowback. I mean, I also want to add that this is to me for Trump. This is like a strike in bowling. I can see a midnight call between him and Vladimir, where Vladimir says, hey, you know, you want to, you want to protect Russia. You want to undermine Ukraine. What you do is, you know, you have this combination of we're not going to fund Ukraine until we resolve the border wall. I mean, the southern border, all those issues. And then you work as hard as you can not to resolve those issues. And then you have no funding going to Ukraine and Russia wins. Well, this is a stretch. He's working at both ends. And the other end, of course, is trying to impeach the Homeland Security guy, and a lot of people believe there must be some fire where the smoke is. And so Trump has got a, you know, a big program going and anything that Biden does, you know, falls subject to further criticism. So I go back to the education thing. I go back to the rhetoric thing. Biden has got to explain why Trump is doing this and why he's screwing it up and how Ukraine plays in all this. Those things could not be linked at all. They're different policy questions. You know, and I think if he reveals that or at least tries to, he'll be in better shape. Well, okay, let's go to how Ukraine is tied to this, and it shouldn't be. Everyone knows it shouldn't be. They're two unlike things, but they are. Is there any success from the GOP or Democrats to unwind it and treat Ukraine funding separately? I think John Cornyn from Texas has suggested that just recently, that it's time to unwind Ukraine from this, this Gordian knot that's not going to get fixed for quite some time, it looks like. Your thoughts. Good for him and good for others, you know, who have made. Oh, by the way, John Cornyn is Republican. Yeah, good for any Republican and anybody who makes that point. They should be separated and Trump has got them both stuck. They got to get unstuck, and one way to do that is separate them. So we can address each one, which is different separately. So as I said before, I think he's gone a bridge too far on this Gordian knot that he's created. And I think, you know, intelligent legislators, even including Republican legislators are going to start seeing through this, and they're going to start jumping ship. And hopefully, Cornyn is one of them, and there'll be more to follow. Okay, we've looked like we've run out of time. Chuck, I like your final thoughts on this topic and whether Joe Biden gets out of it in one piece. It will depend on whether he becomes an effective bargain or not. One, he needs the team, the other people who are better and stronger at this. Number two, he needs to identify and get in the room, someone with authority other than Trump, other than a Trump puppet to deal with. And number three, he needs to reverse the polarities so that he not only detaches Ukraine from the border, he says, we're going to make two separate deals. You guys don't honor your deals. So we're not going to trust you to do them simultaneously anymore. You pass our deal on Ukraine, and we will honor our deal on the border. That's the bargaining strategy. Wow. Isn't that kind of breaking negotiation rules of the road? It is talk about the failures of the negotiation while you're still negotiating and keep that from the media's camera lens. No, it's classic art of war. You learn from what didn't work. You don't go back and do the same thing. Listen to your chill, right? You know what doesn't work? It doesn't work to bargain with Trump. It doesn't work to connect Ukraine to the border. Okay, so don't. You don't have to do that, because if you don't do that and they won't bargain with you, you're no different than you are now. You lose nothing. But they also gain nothing, because at that point, they can say whatever they want to say. They can try and blame the Democrats. But if Biden, like Jay says, calls attention to the fact that the problem at the border is triple influx for which Congress is not providing the resources to deal with it. Doesn't matter what we do on legislation unless they provide the resource. Number two, Ukraine has nothing to do with it. Number three, Trump is somebody who cannot be bargained with because he will not ever honor a deal. Every deal is an invitation to bargain more. Those three points, he makes those three points. He sticks with them. He stays clear and consistent with them. He lives with them, and he gets his team together and says, you want to make a deal? You come see us. You want to leave it as it is? You leave it as it is. Those are your two choices. Okay, thank you, Chuck. Hey, Jay, before I ask you for your final opinion, you know, Richard Nixon got himself in a little bit of trouble, and it was reported and published the last five years that behind the scenes as a private citizen, he actually got in the mix between the negotiations of the Johnson administration and North Vietnam. He actually discouraged North Vietnamese and did lure them away from the peace negotiation table. There was a lot of speculation that was in violation of the Logan Act, where a private citizen gets in the way of negotiations. Is Donald Trump steering in that direction as well? Well, good question. I think the Logan Act is for the effect that a private citizen cannot do diplomacy with other countries. It's hard to prove that it's hard to prove that Trump is doing diplomacy with other countries. But if you put these out of line, somebody has to call them for it. Unfortunately, this is not like a settlement conference in chambers where there is an overarching settlement judge who calls you out if you're playing games. This is just two of them. Now, in this conversation here today, we've had a number of times, we've come up with the conclusion that the public doesn't know. The public has not been informed about the details. There's a lot of ignorance out there. There's a lot of confusion, misinformation, disinformation on this issue, and Trump is taking advantage of that. But she always does. That's what he does. But when you say that, when you reach that conclusion, you're really saying that somebody has failed to explain it to the public. Now, that could be Biden, but it's also the media. I mean, we all three of us, we watch the media, we try to be informed, we look at all those talk shows, we hear what they say. And frankly, even with that, I don't think we fully understand the short strokes of what happened in this quote negotiation. So I think the media failed to educate us. And it's time the media got straight about this. I don't want to hear both sides of the story when one side is lying. I want to hear what really happened. And the media has got to get around to that, or we will have a very perverse result in this election and in policy. They have got to educate the public. Of course, Biden does too. But if they both, you know, bend every effort to do that, we'll have a better set of circumstance. Alrighty. Well, Jay, you get the final word on that, and it was a good one. So I'd like to thank my special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton. And as always, my co-host, Jay Fidel. Why don't you join us next week for American Issues Take One? I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And if you like this program, click like and subscribe. And until then, Aloha.