Trump may be the most xenophobic American leader in United States history. From the effort to restrict immigrants from mostly Muslim countries and the drastic reduction in refugee admissions, to efforts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and the denial of asylum seekers from Central America, Trump’s policies have transformed immigration to the United States.

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By the time that Republican Donald Trump ran for president in 2015, calling for a “great big wall” along the southern border and a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims coming to the United States, the idea that Mexican “criminals” and Muslim “terrorists” were “invading” the United States had been well established and even normalized in the media. Many Americans expressed outrage at these explicitly racist and xenophobic positions. But in fact, Trump was repeating a message that had been gaining traction for decades, and has long been an American tradition.

Given that Biden is now using “almost identical language,” a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “why should people make the same conclusion?”

She struggled to answer the question, saying only that Biden would have “new enforcement tools” if the bill passed, and that shutting down the border would have “a different definition” than it did in the past.

The reporter then asked why the bill should pass, given that not even the White House had seen any text of its provisions. She denied that there was any contradiction: “The White House team has been part of the negotiations. … I don’t want to get ahead of the conversations. I don’t want to get in the middle of negotiations.”