Donald Trump has said that he loves the chart “more than I even love the police” and that he will “sleep with that chart for the rest of my life.” He has made it a recurring campaign prop and is likely to show it again when he returns to Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, writes Adriana Gomez Licon for the AP. Since the July assassination attempt, Trump has professed a unique fondness for a bar chart he credits for saving his life, In the oft-told sequence of events, as Trump addressed the crowd in Butler about illegal immigration, he had just turned his head to review a chart that detailed U.S.-Mexico border crossings during his administration and President Joe Biden’s term. One bullet nicked his right ear.
The chart, which depicts a dramatic increase in encounters with migrants at the southern border, helps the Republican presidential nominee connect a defining moment from his 2024 campaign to his signature issue since he entered politics. Border crossings hit record highs during the Biden administration but have fallen since Biden instituted a curb on asylum claims by executive order earlier this year. Gomez Licon traces the chart’s origins to a Wisconsin senator, Ron Johnson, who showed it to Trump in April. Trump’s team took Johnson’s version, edited and rolled it out that same day at an event with law enforcement officers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At that event, Trump referred to people in the U.S. illegally who are suspected of committing crimes as “animals.” Gomez Licon also goes through the chart’s claims and factchecks them, noting, for instance, that the description of the chart says “Biden world record illegal immigrants, many from prisons and mental institutions,” a claim Trump typically makes in rallies, though there is no evidence that countries are sending their criminals or mentally ill across the border.
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