Turns out that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator,” had some basic lessons in dictatorship to learn at the feet of top banana Donald Trump.
Lessons such as: Always have contempt for anyone you deal with; anyone who needs you is ripe for exploitation and betrayal; never give a sucker an even break; and always lie.
Bukele, it turns out, has more regard for the Constitution of the United States than the president does. He had agreed to imprison only “convicted criminals” to the notorious CECOT prison to which the United States has now deported more than 200 persons.
In a communication that U.S. officials characterized as urgent, Bukele also wanted assurances that each of the deportees was in fact a member of the transnational drug gang Tren de Aragua.
All of this has now been reported in a devastating New York Times story documenting how Trump and the administration played Bukele and El Salvador—and how the cozy Oval Office photo-op between Bukele and Trump papered over Trump’s failure to hold up his end of the bargain.
As it turned out, none of the deportees received the due process to which the Supreme Court has held unanimously all are entitled so that a court could determine their gang status.
Moreover, untold numbers of the deportees have no criminal record, and at least some were shipped there by mistake, including eight women (CECOT is male-only) and, most notoriously, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom several U.S. officials have conceded was sent there by mistake.
In a revealing series of interviews coincident with the 100-day mark of his second presidency, Trump has made clear that, as usual, he snookered everyone: Bukele, U.S. Judge Paula Xinis, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, and the Supreme Court; and he is now in the process of trying to snooker the American people about Abrego Garcia.
Trump has been claiming—ever since shortly after his government, playing fast and loose with the order of Judge Jeb Boasberg, spirited Abrego Garcia out of the country—that the administration lacks all power to facilitate his release from custody. It never made any sense to me, or to a lot of other commentators, and I called it out as an implausible lie at the time: “It is preposterous to argue—and the administration has done nothing to show—that it would be anything other than a light lift to secure Abrego Garcia’s release with a simple request to Bukele.”
And now Trump himself has given the lie to the claim. In an interview earlier this week with Terry Moran of ABC News, Trump admitted that “I could” get Abrego-Garcia back but that he hasn’t tried.
Trump now is in heavy propaganda mode to argue that the mistaken deportation of Abrego Garcia is a “no-harm-no-foul” episode because Abrego Garcia actually is a dangerous member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan crime organization.
But there are severe problems with this claim. First, it at best relies on a partial and heavily edited account of the evidence. In the ABC interview, Trump brandished a picture of Abrego Garcia’s tattooed knuckles that Moran pointed out had been doctored.
Moreover, he is backpedaling from the admission in court that the deportation was “an administrative error,” but that flies in the face of a series of similar concessions by multiple administration lawyers, including his own solicitor general.
Second, and more important, Trump is simply ignoring the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court that the determination of Abrego-Garcia’s affiliation must be made by a federal judge in a habeas corpus action. If the administration is so positive that it has the goods to prove Abrego Garcia was properly deported, let it present it to a court, as should have happened in the first place.
And that brings us to perhaps the most flagrant duping in the Abrego Garcia case, as revealed at the most recent hearing in Judge Xinis’s courtroom, which took place Wednesday.
After the Supreme Court sent the case back to Xinis, the judge ordered up a condensed round of discovery, including depositions, to force the United States to demonstrate its compliance with the judicial command to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, setting a new deadline of May 9.
The administration continually dodged increasingly clear orders from Xinis, who was obviously at the end of her rope and ready to lower the boom.
At that point, the administration asked for, and Abrego Garcia’s attorneys agreed to, a one-week reprieve, which the judge granted. All of it was done with sealed filings, but the clear assumption was that the administration had blinked and had represented to the court and plaintiff that it was going to at least make significant headway in bringing Abrego Garcia home.
That week ended Wednesday, and, surprise surprise, the administration had nothing to offer and returned to its prior intransigence. In fact, the administration requested a stay of discovery, which judge Xinis promptly denied, ordering depositions in the case to be completed by the end of next week.
The latest in a long series of moments of Lucy pulling the football away caused Abrego Garcia’s lawyer to say that the administration was “talking out of both sides of its mouth.” That’s a lawyerly euphemism for what the administration is doing.
Even as he has tried to paint Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, and even as he has claimed, ridiculously, that he is powerless to bring him back, Trump has continued to represent his respect for the Supreme Court and his intention to obey its orders.
We’ll see how long that lasts. Trump’s tortured argument that the ragtag collection of Tren de Aragua gang members in the United States constitute a “predatory incursion” by a foreign country was firmly rejected Thursday by a Trump appointee in the Southern District of Texas. Judge Fernando Rodriguez methodically went through history and plain meaning to conclude that the whole basis of the deportations was “unlawful.” That’s the first important blow of what will be many court decisions and an eventual Supreme Court opinion. But it completely changes the tenor of the debate.
For those of us gullible enough to entertain Trump’s suggestions, the last week drives home his many ways of wriggling out of that promise to the American people. Trump has an endless capacity for recharacterizing or obfuscating, or shifting responsibility, or blaming Joe Biden, or revising his comments. And of course, there is always the shameless lie.
A recent NPR poll found that 85 percent of Americans believe that Trump needs to obey a ruling of the Supreme Court. In a country as divided by partisan passions as ours, that level of consensus is nothing short of astonishing. It may be that such a formidable level of public opposition will stay Trump’s hand. It’s hard to see what else will do it; factors that we’ve always counted on, such as respect for the rule of law or common decency, are for Trump no more than platitudes for suckers like Bukele, or Judge Xinis, or the American people.
