Trump unleashes pre-recorded SOTU rebuttal, blasting Biden border crisis, floundering US economy

Former President Trump on Tuesday seemed to already know what President Biden was going to tout in his State of the Union address – criticizing him ahead of the speech on a range of issues – from a southern U.S. border being overwhelmed by illegal migration to an economy battered by inflation and in peril of falling into a recession. 

"Here's the real state of the union," Trump says in the roughly two-minute, pre-recorded video address. "Over the past two years under Biden, millions and millions of illegal aliens from 160 different countries, have stormed across our southern border."

The White House did not say in a fact sheet released before Biden's address in House Chambers, before a joint session of Congress, that he would address the issue. However, the administration has previously argued it is dealing with the world-wide migration problem in a humane and orderly manner.

However, the White House did acknowledge that Biden would in his address pose ways to stop to the influx of the potentially-deadly synthetic narcotic fentanyl at the U.S. points of entry.

Said Trump: "Drug cartels are now raking in billions of dollars from smuggling poison to kill our people and to kill our children."

On urban crime, which reached record highs at the high of the pandemic, and in some cities is still above pre-pandemic levels, Trump said: "Savage killers, rapists and violent criminals are being released from jail to continue their crime wave. And under Biden, the murder rate has reached the highest in the history of our country." 

To be sure, Trump is more than a sideline critic, having already officially declared his bid win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, with Biden pondering a run for a second term and a rematch of his and Trump's 2020 race. 

"I am running for president to end the destruction of our country and to complete the unfinished business of making America great again," he said. "We will make our country better than ever before, and will always put America first." 

Trump also blamed "radical Democrats," for the country's economic woes, saying they "wasted trillions of dollars and caused the worst inflation in half a century."

"Real wages are down 21 months in row," he also said, amid the argument that massive spending bills passed in the previously Democrat-controlled House and Senate overheated the economy by pumping in too much cash.

Trump also accused Biden, as other Republicans have, of having "weaponized" the Justice Department to "persecute his political opponents."

"And I'm a victim of it," he said, a likely reference to the FBI raid on his Florida estate this past summer looking for classified documents.

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