You have to hand it to the Biden Administration. They may not be very good at gaslighting, but they keep trying.

I would normally say that practice would make perfect, but since the MSM refuses to call them out on their constant deception they may never have to improve.

A perfect example was this exchange between Fox News’ Peter Doocy and Karine Jean-Pierre, in which KJP literally said that no migrants “happened to be” at a migrant aid facility the day that Biden visited El Paso.

Karine Jean-Pierre says it was simply a coincidence there were no illegal immigrants around during Biden's drive-by in El Paso last weekend. pic.twitter.com/8c8xcR0le3

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 11, 2023

Seems plausible. I mean, how many migrants could there possibly be in El Paso? We keep being told the border is “secure,” and Biden didn’t see any migrants at the facility he visited, or sleeping on the streets of El Paso, so perhaps the problem isn’t that big anyway. Biden can say “I came, I saw, I conquered the border crisis!”

Look at how the Rio Grande had no border crossers the day Biden visited. His visit magically solved the problem.

The border in El Paso before and after Biden’s visit is announced

Must be another coincidence pic.twitter.com/0Y8CrnTmh3

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 8, 2023

It’s almost as if making an effort to stop people from crossing the border results in fewer border crossings, and if you make an effort to clean up the streets of El Paso life would get better for the people of the city.

Just spitballing here. It has been decades since I got my degree, so my analytical skills may be rusty. Perhaps KJP is right and it was totally coincidental that there were no migrants crossing the Rio Grande the day Biden visited and none languishing in the streets of El Paso either.

Coincidences do happen. It would make me a conspiracy theorist to believe that the federal government pulled a Potemkin Village stunt. KJP tells me that it would be wrong to think so. El Paso’s lack of any migrants the day of Biden’s visit had nothing to do with enhanced enforcement ordered by the Administration to ensure that Biden got some good photos of him proving there really isn’t a problem.

Biden to visit the border in El Paso. DHS out in force to sanitize the area, move illegals and tents so Biden won’t see reality. pic.twitter.com/xUGXcKysgY

— MarineVet (@drummy46) January 8, 2023

Democrats are famously good at solving the problem of homelessness and securing the border, so why wouldn’t we believe KJP’s assertion that migrants “just happened” to be elsewhere during Biden’s visit. Why would we expect the shelter he visited to be overflowing anyway? Hardly a migrant to be found in the whole city, so it would be perfectly normal for a migrant facility to be empty when he visited.

Just a reminder this is what El Paso, Texas looks like before they cleared up the homeless camps for Joe Biden to see. pic.twitter.com/PU3ssAXxFF

— T-REX (@OGMFTrex) January 8, 2023

One of the wonderful parts of KJP’s back and forth with Doocy was her actually bragging that border crossings dropped suddenly with Biden’s visit. This is proof, you see, that Biden is all about border security.

Will the gaslighting work? Probably not, except with his core constituency. People have pretty fixed opinions about the border crisis, and Biden is pitching his message to the people who desperately want to believe him, not to people who think he has flubbed the border in the same way he flubbed the Afghanistan withdrawal.

He needs to convince just enough people that the probably isn’t serious. His core strategy for reelection is to keep his base super excited and scare people about Trump and/or DeSantis. This strategy will probably work if his opposition is Trump, and probably not if his opponent is DeSantis, who is just not that scary to Independent voters.

The Fox News watchers know what is happening in El Paso; Biden’s pitch is to voters who will look at the pretty photos of ol’ Joe “caring deeply,” beamed to them by the other media outlets.

One of my favorite reactions to the rapid clean up of El Paso was this suggestion that Biden plan his next visit to San Francisco. That way the city can frantically clean up the homeless program to prove that there is no problem at all.

San Franciscans are pleading Biden to visit San Francisco next, so his cronies might be able to clean up like they did in El Paso, TX!pic.twitter.com/14pRtNyiDd

— 🇺🇸 Pismo 🇺🇸 (@Pismo_B) January 9, 2023

Do people care enough to see through the gaslighting, or do they just want to be told a comforting story about how everything is just fine?

We shall see in 2024. The 2022 elections have dampened by hopes, though.