Okay, not all of it is wrong, just the very core of it. We'll get to that in a moment but first let's step back and look at the article published today by Politico. It's titled "The resistance to Trump is different this time. Just look at immigration." The gist is that Democrats have decided not to run around shouting about preserving democracy after Trump's clear win. That didn't work for them obviously so they are trying a new approach. The plan is to remain calm and pick their battles.

Democratic governors have decried Trump’s mass deportation plans and pledged to bar state law enforcement from involvement in major roundups — but they have signaled a willingness to work with him to remove criminals. Some blue city mayors have fortified so-called sanctuary laws, but others have shied away from highlighting that status. And some Democratic leaders have argued the party must take a harder line on immigration after tacking to the left under Trump’s first administration...

“President-elect Trump is talking about deporting criminals. We should be for that. Everybody should be for that. And I think that the incoming administration should really be working with Democrats that want to work on this. I’d be willing to work with them,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) in an interview...

“The shock and awe of 2017 was ‘we’re going to resist, we’re going to resist,’” Lake added. “I think this year, it’s more, ‘we’re going to be calm. We’re going to be looking for places to work together. We’re going to pick our moments, and we’re going to try to shape not just opposition, but try to shape alternatives.”

It's worth noting that the only reason Democrats are saying this is that plan A, which was to run around with their hair on fire shouting about saving democracy, failed spectacularly. The party bet that they could overcome Biden's disadvantage on immigration by simply calling Trump a fascist. Turns out that was not a good bet.

To be clear, Democrats started issuing warnings about immigration a full year ago. I wrote about Steve Rattner's take last January. Here's a bit of what he said.

We must reduce the flow to the border, which will require making immigrating into the U.S. by such means more difficult. As Republicans have long demanded and Democrats are coming to see as necessary, our obligation under international law to provide asylum need not create chaos.

And it's fair to say the administration got the message and began trying to do something about the surging number of people at the border. But voters seem to have decided it was too little, too late.

As for the claim that Democrats are taking a more prudent approach now, that's not exactly true. As I pointed out here last week, Democrats are all over the map on this issue. You have Rep. Suozzi (quoted above) and Mayor Adams in New York, who seems ready to have police work with ICE to remove criminal aliens. On the other hand you have San Francisco city attorney David Chiu who is publicly vowing to fight Trump's efforts in the courts. You also have the city of Boston reaffirming its commitment to sanctuary city policies even as Gov. Maura Healey made a point of claiming Massachusetts was not a sanctuary state.

Democrats may have toned down their shrieking a bit but the idea that they are pragmatically agreeing to work with president-elect Trump is just not true. Some are and some aren't. Some have realized that the party moved too far left and some haven't figured that out or are in denial. You get very different answers depending on who you ask.

Finally this brings us to the whopper at the core of this piece. It's the claim that the immigration surge which hurt Biden in the election wasn't his fault. As Politico sees it, it was just something that happened to him.

President Joe Biden vowed to fix the country’s immigration system after four years of Trump, but he was stymied by a worldwide surge in migration and GOP opposition that pounced on scenes of a chaotic border. He embraced some Trump-era policies, while also opening up parole pathways for some immigrants to come to the country legally.

What they've written here is that Bided "vowed to fix" immigration but, unfortunately, a worldwide surge just happened to hit and he was forced to retreat from his plans and embrace Trump's policies instead.

This is complete nonsense. Are the authors really this clueless? Do they actually believe this?

What actually happened is that Biden vowed to "fix immigration" which specifically meant undoing as many of Trump's restrictions as quickly as he could. This is exactly what he did, starting on day one of his administration. The result was that word quickly spread the border was open and for the next three years the situation kept getting worse until we hit a new record in December of 2023 for the number of migrants arriving in a single month. Only then did Democrats truly panic and decide they needed to do something before the 2024 election.

But here's the key point: The immigration surge didn't just happen to Joe Biden, like a hurricane or a natural disaster. Joe Biden was the hurricane. He caused the surge through his deliberate action as president to undo Trump's policies.

None of this is remotely controversial. Biden himself expressed concern that, if he were careless, he'd have 2 million people show up at the southern border. By March of 2021, it was already clear that we were headed in that direction. Here's what the Washington Post wrote at the time.

He issued five immigration executive orders on Inauguration Day alone and promised an immigration policy far more humane and welcoming than that of his predecessor. His administration also began allowing unaccompanied minors into the country, a marked departure from the Trump administration’s approach.

Now, the Biden administration is scrambling to control the biggest surge in 20 years, with the nation on pace for as many as 2 million migrants at the southern border this year — the outcome Biden said he wanted to avoid...

The situation at the border — which Biden and his advisers steadfastly refuse to call a crisis — is the result of an administration that was forewarned of the coming surge, yet still ill-prepared and lacking the capacity to deal with it. Administration officials have been plagued by muddled messaging, sometimes making appeals that seem directed more at liberal activists than the migrants they need to dissuade from coming to the country.

And of course we now know it continued to get worse and ultimately became the biggest surge of migrants in US history:

The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.

Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

Why does this matter and why does it bother me so much? Because Politico is rewriting history in a way that just happens to match the delusions of the Biden administration. They can't be allowed to duck responsibility for this mess by claiming it just happened. They must be forced to own it because they caused it. Politico clearly doesn't want to hold them responsible for their own actions so the rest of us have to do it.