Trump claims ‘conservatives and people of faith’ will be ‘hunted’ under second Biden term

Donald Trump opened his CPAC speech with dire warnings of what he thinks will happen if President Joe Biden is re-elected later this year.

“If crooked Joe Biden and his thugs win in 2024, the worst is yet to come,” Mr Trump said at the Gaylord National conference centre in National Harbor, Maryland just outside of Washington, DC on Saturday.

“Our country will ... sink to levels that were unimaginable ... With four more years of Biden, the hordes of illegal aliens stampeding across our borders will exceed 40 to 50 million people. Medicare social security, health care and public education will buckle and collapse ... our economy will be starved of energy by crooked Joe's vindictive, green new scam,” he added as he continued his tirade.

Congressional Republicans recently tanked bipartisan legislation that would add extra border security funding as well as aid for Ukraine.

In 2022, illegal border crossings hit an all-time high at 2.2 million, according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Mr Biden initially kept in place a Trump pandemic policy – Title 42 – allowing the authorities to quickly expel those crossing the border.

“Millions of manufacturing jobs will be choked off into extinction. And you'll have constant ... blackouts and rampant inflation. Ruthless gangs will explode even more into the suburbs,” Mr Trump claimed. “And when they talk about suburban women, they're going to love me so much. They're going to say ‘Oh, I wish we had that guy back.’”

While the Biden administration has made massive investments in green energy and manufacturing, the results of those investments are only now beginning to show.

“The messaging is challenging — people actually need to see the results for themselves,” Rep Dan Kildee of Michigan told Politico in January. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

“The gangs will be invading your territory,” Mr Trump added on Saturday. “I can tell you that weaponized law enforcement hunts for conservatives and people of faith.”

Axios noted in July last year that “Republicans are hammering ‘Joe Biden’s America’ as a land of rising violent crime, surging immigration and out of control inflation, but there’s just one problem: the numbers are starting to move in the opposite direction”.

Congressional Republicans have been fighting the FBI and Department of Justice for years, livid at what they see as the political prosecution of Mr Trump and other rightwingers.

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told Politico in July last year regarding the building of a new headquarters for the FBI: “It’s outrageous that House Republicans are using the men and women of the FBI, the rank-and-file, as political pawns in this process.”

“Everybody has acknowledged that the FBI needs a new headquarters building. I mean, it’s falling down around them. And so what the House Republicans are saying is, we’re not going to repair the building where the men and women of the FBI work from because they disagree with the director of the FBI,” he added at the time.

“China will dominate us, not just economically, but militarily, and that's what they want,” Mr Trump claimed on Saturday.

In 2021, the senior fellow of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, Michael O’Hanlon, wrote that China’s rise is “far from truly foreboding”.

“China is flexing its muscles more than preparing for war; this is not the equivalent of Europe in the late 1930s, given how much China depends on a stable international order for its continued success,” he added at the time. “We do need to stay vigilant, remember the art of war even in this age of (relative) peace, and expand our economic as well as military toolkit for crisis management. We need not and must not panic, however, because doing so could turn manageable crises into truly scary ones.”