SAUNDERS: The State of the Union is not fine at the southern border

WASHINGTON — What impressed me most about President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was the stagecraft. Since Biden doesn’t give many press conferences — he’s delivered 14 so far in this term — the public usually sees him answering shouted questions or walking stiffly on the South Lawn.

The State of the Union speech is more flattering; it showcases a president’s power. All eyes are on the Big Guy. Yes, Biden’s tongue tripped a time or two, but he came armed, prepared and robust. He exceeded my low expectations.

But on the issue most likely to keep Americans up at night — the porous southern border — Biden was fundamentally dishonest.

The president came out fighting — calling out Russian President Vladimir Putin and defending Ukraine and NATO — a stark contrast to former President Donald Trump’s comment that if NATO countries don’t pay enough on defense, Russia can “do whatever the hell they want.”

Biden did not refer to the inevitable GOP nominee by name. Instead POTUS called Trump “my predecessor” — which is ironic, when you consider that Biden’s biggest selling point seems to be that he isn’t Trump.

Then the president blamed border chaos on Republicans who didn’t pass a bipartisan bill in February that included funding for enforcement. Biden left out his role in igniting the crisis when he signaled that, if elected, he’d go easy on those who break federal immigration law.

There were 6.3 million migrant border encounters in the three years that followed his inauguration. The “newcomers” — a Biden White House term — knew that even if they didn’t qualify for asylum, they could buy time. The longer they remained in America, the harder it would be to extract them.

Behind those statistics is a trail of misery, thirst, rape, robbery and abandonment. A truly compassionate executive would have discouraged the boom in human trafficking from the start, because an open border with insufficient vetting enables predators to sneak in as they move among the sheep.

Americans pay the price.

As Biden approached the podium, a MAGA-hat-wearing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., flashed a pin with the name of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student brutally murdered while on a daytime run last month.

Riley has come to represent the inevitable consequences of Biden’s election rhetoric, just as San Franciscan Kate Steinle’s death represented the chaos of San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” status in 2015.

In response to MTG, as Greene is known, Biden said Riley’s name, but he got it wrong — he called her “Lincoln” — and described her as “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.”

“He should have said ‘undocumented,’” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN. (I feel so much safer knowing there are language police on the Hill.)

The man charged with the brutal killing of Riley is a Venezuelan national who, according to authorities, crossed the border illegally in 2022. Like everyone charged with a crime in America, Jose Antonio Ibarra deserves the presumption of innocence pending his day in court.

Law-abiding voters deserve something, too — to see the enforcement of laws enacted in Washington.

The issue Americans care about most, according to Gallup, is immigration. So, no surprise, Biden’s poll numbers are dismal. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows 39.4 percent approval for Biden, and 56.2 percent disapproval. And still, there were Democrats on the floor who chanted, “Four more years.”

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.