Trump, O’Rourke speak at dueling rallies

Associated Press

EL PASO, Texas

President Donald Trump went to Texas to push his immigration policies but turned first to mocking Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman from Texas now mulling a presidential run, as the two had dueling rallies in El Paso on Monday evening.

In a case of pointed political counterprogramming, O’Rourke had an evening march against the wall with dozens of local civic, human rights and Hispanic groups, followed by a protest rally attended by thousands on a baseball field across the street from the arena where Trump was having a rally to make his case for the border wall.

Mocking O’Rourke’s crowds as smaller than his, Trump predicted: “That may be the end of his presidential bid.”

The first dueling rallies of the 2020 election season were set to serve as a preview of a heated yearslong fight over the direction of the country. And they made clear that Trump’s long-promised border wall is sure to play an outsized role in the presidential race, as both sides use it to try to rally their supporters and highlight their contrasting approaches.

“With the eyes of the country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand here in one of the safest cities in America,” O’Rourke said as music and cheers from Trump’s rally blared onto the field. “Safe not because of walls but in spite of walls.”

A half-hour into his own rally, however, Trump had scarcely mentioned immigration, offering just a passing suggestion that those chanting “Build the Wall” switch to “Finish the Wall.”

Meanwhile, negotiators on Capitol Hill announced that lawmakers had reached an agreement in principle to fund the government ahead of a midnight Friday deadline to avoid another shutdown.

Trump has insisted that large portions of the wall are already underway. But the work focuses almost entirely on replacing existing barriers. Work on the first extension – 14 miles in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley – starts this month. The other 83 miles that his administration has awarded contracts for are replacement projects.

Trump has repeatedly pointed to El Paso to make his case that a border wall is necessary, claiming that barriers turned the city from one of the nation’s most dangerous to one of its safest. But that’s not true.

El Paso had a murder rate of less than half the national average in 2005, a year before the most recent expansion of its border fence. That’s despite being just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city plagued by drug violence. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that El Paso’s annual number of reported violent crimes dropped from nearly 5,000 in 1995 to around 2,700 in 2016. But that corresponded with similar declines in violent crime nationwide and included periods when the city’s crime rates increased year over year, despite new fencing and walls.

The Trump campaign released a video showing El Paso residents saying the wall helped reduce crime. But many in the city have bristled at the prospect of becoming a border wall poster child.

That includes O’Rourke, a potential 2020 candidate, who came close to unseating Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 and maintains an army of small-dollar donors and a large social media following. While few Democratic candidates have focused on immigration in their launches, O’Rourke has described Trump’s calls for the wall as the “cynical rhetoric of war, of invasions, of fear.”