Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg alleges President Trump is secretly undermining border security to drum up support for re-election, a claim supported by zero evidence.

The openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana recently sat down for an interview with Axios on HBO to attack the president, making the case that Trump created the problem and only wants it to get worse.

Buttigieg told the news site he “wouldn’t put it past him to allow it to become worse in order to have it be a more divisive issue, so that he could benefit politically.”

The comments came in context of a question about whether Buttigieg acknowledges the raging immigration crisis on the southern border, which is expected to reach well over 1 million illegal immigrants admitted into the country in fiscal year 2019.

“It certainly represents a crisis of largely this administration’s making,” Buttigieg said, ignoring decades of illegal immigration that’s plagued numerous previous administrations, including an unprecedented surge of unaccompanied minors during President Obama’s tenure.

NPR reported in January on how Obama’s policies have made things worse.

“Immigration hardliners argue that the Obama administration was too lenient with migrant families and children, by releasing them from detention and allowing them to live in the United States while their immigration cases were pending,” according to the news site.

“However well-intentioned those policies might have been, immigration hawks say they acted as an invitation to more migrants from Central America to make the same trip to the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told NPR “Obama’s administration blasted a range of loopholes that, collectively, incentivized illegal immigration, no doubt about it.”

Regardless, Buttigieg lives in a different world, where Trump is plotting ways to break his signature campaign promise by allowing the problem to fester, though Buttigieg didn’t discuss the complete unwillingness of congressional Democrats to negotiate a viable solution.

The 2020 candidate, one of a handful polling in double digits out of two dozen Democrats running to unseat Trump, would not answer whether Trump’s call for increasing barriers on the border and better screening asylum seekers would be good things.

“Look, it’s worth having a conversation about border security in the context of comprehensive immigration reform, but President Trump is wrong in his approach on this issue, at every point. From the near-term part, which is horrible policies like family separation and also kind of thoughtlessly using U.S. troops as props on the border, to the big picture, which is that this would not be such a problem, if we had stability in Central American countries,” Buttigieg said.

“And as it turns out that immigration is more useful to this president as a crisis unsolved than it would be as an achievement if he actually fixed it. We could fix it,” Mayor Pete alleged. “I mean there’s enough of a consensus among the American people and even in Washington about the terms of bipartisan comprehensive immigration freeform and yet they still can’t deliver because the president needs this to be a problem for his domestic political purposes.”

Axios on HBO asked Buttigieg point-blank: “So you’re saying the president is using the border crisis to get re-elected.”

“The president needs this crisis to get worse, even though it makes a liar out of him,” Buttigieg said. “I don’t think he’s worried about that.”

“I don’t think he c