Welcome to the Third World
If you did not catch Donald Trump’s Oval Office visit with President Nayib Bukele, the Jailer of El Salvador, Digby provided a series of hair-raising clips. Including the one where Bukele tells Trump that “you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people you have to imprison some.” Reagan was dubbed “the Great Communicator.” Bukele suggests Trump can be the Great Liberator by sending more people, Americans included, and on his say-so to Bukele’s concentration camp.
Trump urged Bukele to build more prisons, in fact. Bukele presented himself like a banana republic dictator from an episode of TV’s “Mission Impossible.” And Trump? He eats it up. Their exchange on why neither has the power to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) where he was disappeared erroneously(?) was as unscripted as an episode of “The Apprentice.”
The Trump administration play-acts as if it is not openly defying the Supreme Court’s instruction to return the prisoner for due process in the U.S., writes Adam Serwer, by “pretending it is complying while refusing to do so.” Trump could get him returned with a word or a phone call. He chooses not to.
Chief propagandist Stephen Miller declared Abrego Garcia a terrorist on his say-so and stood the Supreme Court’s 9-0 order on its head. It was a sweeping decision in the president’s favor, Miller insisted. But the flashing anger Miller displays at anyone challenging Trump’s dictatorial powers is not play-acting. It is psychotic.
Serwer writes:
This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law. The administration is maintaining that it has the power to send armed agents of the state to grab someone off the street and then, without a shred of due process, deport them to a Gulag in a foreign country and leave them there forever. The crucial point here is that the administration’s logic means that it could do the same to American citizens—after all, if deporting someone under a protective order to a Gulag without so much as a hearing is a “foreign policy” matter with which no court may interfere, then the citizenship of the condemned person doesn’t matter.
YOUR citizenship doesn’t matter.
“The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will,” Serwer continues. “This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.”
Joyce Vance writes at her substack what the world can (and did) see on Monday:
If there were a map that showed democracy slipping into dictatorship, we would be at the spot marked “You are here.” We shouldn’t sugarcoat the danger. Due process matters to immigrants and Americans alike. When the presidency refuses to honor it, we are all in danger. Donald Trump could snap his fingers and secure Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. We all know that’s true, no matter what pretense this administration assumes.
We’ve been warned. Our slip into dictatorship has happened, as Hemingway put it, “gradually, then suddenly.” Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to stop Trump and his hatchetmen, and rescue the American republic they’ve declared war on.
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