James Carville on Tuesday said Donald Trump’s administration is trying to do “everything” to draw Americans’ attention to immigration instead of the president’s handling of the economy and his “big, beautiful bill” that could see massive cuts to Medicaid and food assistance.
The Democratic strategist told MSNBC’s Ari Melber that as companies warn of lower earnings and Trump works to get the bill with his agenda through Congress, his Justice Department charged Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) over a skirmish with federal agents outside a New Jersey immigration detention facility.
“I think they’re in the midst of a massive failure,” declared Carville, who argued that the charges against McIver — a Black woman — are racially motivated.
He continued, “The economy is going terribly. He’s passed five things since the Congress started. It’s nothing.”
“And all of a sudden, when you got nothing to go on, ‘Hey, let’s get the Black person and we can change the conversation,’ that’s what I really, really believe,” he added.
McIver was charged with assaulting a federal agent outside New Jersey’s Delaney Hall — the largest immigration detention facility on the East Coast — with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, whose charges were dropped after he was arrested for trespassing.
McIver, in a statement, emphasized that Democrats were using their oversight capacity to inspect the treatment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees at the facility and federal law enforcement agents created “an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation” upon their arrest of Baraka, leading to the “purely political” charges against her.
Carville, a lead strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, predicted that McIver will raise millions in legal fees and get “lawyers like you wouldn’t believe” assisting her in the case because people like him are “totally outraged” over the charges.
He said he suspects that since the case Trump’s Justice Department had against Baraka fell apart, the administration needed to go after someone else and — eventually — it’ll move on to some other “distraction” from its failures.
“They’ll continue to put that bait out there and we’re just going to continue to hit at it,” Carville said.
