Trump Brags He Delivered the Death Knell to Bipartisan Bill: ‘It’s Dead!’

Former President Donald Trump took credit for killing a bipartisan immigration bill hammered out by the U.S. Senate last week.

After long negotiations with Democrats, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) released the full text of the legislation on Sunday. But even before its provisions were made public, Trump urged Republicans to vote against it because he aims to use border security and immigration against President Joe Biden on the campaign trail ahead of November’s election.

Congressional Republicans heeded Trump’s call, as the legislation failed to clear a procedural hurdle in the Senate. Over in the House, Republican leadership had declared that even if the bill passed the upper chamber, it would be dead on arrival.

Speaking at a National Rifle Association event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Friday night, Trump boasted of tanking the bill.

“You give illegals taxpayer-funded lawyers, so they have millions of dollars in this agreement, in this deal, which we by the way killed,” Trump said. “I think we killed it. I think it’s dead! But you can never say

it because bad bills always come back to life because these guys make a lot of money with bad bills. But they give millions, tens of millions of dollars that’s down there to lawyers to represent the illegal immigrants that come into our country. It’s not even believable.”

Trump’s remarks about lawyers were presumably a reference to a measure in the bill that would have allocated up to $350 million to provide immigration lawyers to unaccompanied children under 13 years of age.