It has often been said that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. If that’s the case, former President Donald Trump ought to feel quite flattered. Kamala Harris revealed a couple of presidential policy points recently, and they seem oddly familiar.
Anyone following her opponent’s campaign, however, will see that these proposals are a little different. Indeed, the oft-repeated line is but part of the original quote – and leaving it there is about like quoting Ronald Reagan as saying: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Leaving off the rest changes the meaning entirely. As Oscar Wilde actually said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
Kamala Harris – The Not-So Border Czar
While speaking to supporters at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, August 10, Harris declared that she knows the issues with the immigration system and how to fix them, pointing to her time as California’s attorney general for proof. She didn’t tout her time in the Swamp as the second highest ranking member of a presidential administration – a time during which she was tasked with finding and fixing the “root causes” of migration like poverty and violence in Central America. Rather, she points to a time when she allegedly fought the cartels in the California courtrooms.
Harris told those at the rally Saturday that the fix is “stronger border security” – now that sounds familiar – “and an earned pathway to citizenship.” But while she seems to agree at least in part with her opponent on what should happen at the border – enough that she copied his position, anyway – she doesn’t give him any credit for actually meaning it. “Donald Trump [doesn’t] want to fix this problem,” she declared. “He talks a big game – about a lot of things – but he talks a big game about border security. But he does not walk the walk.”
Republicans have often pointed to Harris’ alleged time as border czar and her failure to even visit the border, never mind fix anything. Democrats, of course, now say that she never was officially a czar and that she wasn’t put in charge of America’s borders. But she was still the vice president, and she was tasked with addressing illegal immigration in some form even by her own admission. One must wonder why the policies she says will work once she’s elected president weren’t put into play during her time as VP. For that matter, why can’t they be enacted now, while she still holds that authority? Is she implying that President Joe Biden would shut her down?
Perhaps Those Roots Should Have Stayed Buried
Even had Harris only been tasked with addressing “root causes” outside this country, how did that turn out? A look at border apprehensions from 1990 to 2022 gathered by Statista shows that illegal immigration remained relatively low during Trump’s term when compared to former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama – aside from a spike in 2019 that fell short even of the highs of the Clinton and Bush years – only to rise sharply as soon as Biden and Harris took over. Apprehensions at the border totaled just shy of 610,000 for 2020 but rose to 1.8 million in 2021 and nearly 2.6 million in 2022. A report from November of 2023 by the America First Policy Institute showed a record-setting 3.2 million “encounters” with illegals for the fiscal year, the worst year on record, as the report explained. All told, that’s around 7.6 million unlawful crossings in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, and recent reports indicate they’re on track to hit the ten million mark soon.
By comparison, the entire four years of Trump saw just over 3.1 million, and it took Clinton seven years to break ten million – a milestone neither Bush nor Obama hit in two full terms each. To make matters worse, while illegal immigration skyrocketed, overall drug seizures fell, according to US Customs and Border Protection – implying, though not necessarily proving, that drug traffickers were able to get more of their product across the border in the chaos. If Harris indeed worked to address the root causes, whatever she did clearly backfired.
Another Tip From Trump
At the Vegas rally, Harris also unveiled a proposal to “raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” It was in the very same city that the former president first proposed eliminating tip taxes in June.
Trump responded on Truth Social, saying: “Kamala Harris, whose ‘Honeymoon’ period is ENDING, and is starting to get hammered in the Polls, just copied my NO TAXES ON TIPS policy. The difference is, she won’t do it, she just wants it for Political Purposes! This was a TRUMP idea – She has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”
“For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy, because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips,” Trump said back in June. “It’s been a point of contention for years and years and years, and you do a great job of service, you take care of people and I think it’s going to be something that is really deserved.”
But again, the Harris proposal isn’t quite the same as Trump’s. Consider the other half – the part she actually mentioned first. If elected, Harris hopes to increase the federal minimum wage. This has been a rallying cry for Democrats for years, despite the historically verifiable spikes in price inflation that has so far always follows such an increase, wiping out any gains in actual buying power minimum-wage workers may have temporarily seen and shuttering small and medium size businesses. As Andrew Moran reported for Liberty Nation News in January, the most recent drastic increase at the state level – California’s new $16-per-hour fast food wage – brought store closures and massive layoffs before it even took effect. One could imagine that anyone given that raise to $0 per hour – that is, folks who got laid off instead – pine for the days of “low pay.”
The Harris-Walz campaign clearly saw and understood how people reacted to both Trump’s proposals and, in a far more negative manner, the failed policies of the Biden-Harris administration. Perhaps they shouldn’t be faulted for recognizing a good idea when they see it. It all does, however, raise questions about this team’s integrity – already a hot topic thanks to the addition of Tim Walz to the campaign. Copying Trump and promising better border security and tax cuts may be a smart move, but will voters trust them to follow through?
