Campaign

Trump seeks to tie Biden to Sanders

President Trump on Wednesday sought to tie former Vice President Joe Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), attacking the plan developed by their unity task force and falsely claiming it includes “Open Borders.”

“Has anybody seen or reviewed the written ‘pact’ between Bernie Sanders & Sleepy Joe. It is further left than even Bernie had in mind,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “Open Borders, crime, really bad to cops and military The guaranteed destruction of America. Joe never told us this. Never been so CLEAR!!!”

Sanders, a former 2020 presidential candidate and self-described democratic socialist, has come under attack by the president and his allies as the “radical left” since Trump took office in 2016. 

Trump has increasingly sought to portray the former vice president as in thrall to the Democratic Party’s left wing, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity last week that Biden has “been taken over by the radical left.”

The president made similar comments Tuesday in a Rose Garden event that became an extended attack on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who he accused of being co-opted by the “radical left.”

The task force’s proposal calls for “creating a 21st-century immigration system” that, among other provisions, would reverse Trump administration rules restricting the ability of foreign nationals to claim asylum due to gang or domestic violence, as well as end the administration’s policy of requiring asylum-seekers to apply from a “safe third country.”

The plan also calls for body cameras for all police officers and an end to the practice of sending local police precincts surplus military weaponry. Biden made similar points in an interview with activist Ady Barkan, saying the use of such weaponry by police can make the communities they work in perceive them as “the enemy.”