Even by the ugly standards of this administration, the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia stands out.
A Salvadoran migrant and metal worker in Maryland with no criminal record other than traffic violations and illegal entry into the country, he was arrested by immigration authorities in March and deported to one of the notorious prisons of his homeland, in contravention of a U.S. immigration judge’s order. The government acknowledged the “administrative error” — an Orwellian euphemism for a Kafkaesque nightmare — but petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a federal judge’s order requiring his return on Monday. The same day, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the lower court’s order so it can have time to consider the case.
Abrego Garcia was an unimportant person when he was deported — except, of course, to his wife and son and two stepchildren. He is the subject of an accusation that he belonged to the MS-13 gang — but there is only flimsy evidence and no proof. The entire edifice of American justice is built on the conviction that there is no guilt without proof beyond reasonable doubt — and that there is no unimportant person, at least not in the eyes of the law.
I’ve been thinking about this case as an emblem of everything that makes Donald Trump’s presidency so vile and destructive, even when I’ve bent over backward to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even when I’ve agreed with him on this or that point of policy. I have, to borrow a line from Peggy Noonan, a “certain idea of America.” He ain’t it.
What is that “certain idea”? It has to do with a type of democratic nobility, something most of us can recognize the moment we see it. It’s Sojourner Truth asking the suffragists at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a woman?” It’s Lou Gehrig, stricken with A.L.S. in his 30s, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
It’s Gail Halvorsen, the candy bomber of the Berlin Airlift, parachuting chocolates and gum to the hungry children of the besieged city. It’s John McCain refusing an offer to be released before other American P.O.W.s in North Vietnamese captivity — and, 40 years later, publicly rebuking a supporter for calling Barack Obama, his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, “an Arab.”
It’s Robert F. Kennedy after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.” It’s George H.W. Bush after lightning victory in the Persian Gulf war: “This is not a time of euphoria, certainly not a time to gloat.”
Democratic nobility is also found on a page I keep in my desk drawer, a passenger manifest of the ship that brought my 10-year-old mother to the United States, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Right below my mother’s name and nationality — “Stateless” — there is Jamil Issa Hasan, 26, Jordanian; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; and Gerda Nesselroth, 45, also stateless.
Soon to be Americans all.
What all of this boils down to is the self-restraint and compassion of the temporarily powerful, the self-respect and absence of self-pity of the temporarily weak, and the shared conviction that strong and weak are united in a common democratic creed. It’s what people used to admire about our national character — mythologized to some extent, but based in something real: understatement and confidence, decency and expectation, the America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
This is what feels so wholly absent today. Those of us who count as coastal elites are expected to be deferential to the “real America” that elected this administration — one that’s supposedly more in tune with the country’s spirit than the Martha’s Vineyard set. Fine, please educate us.
But I struggle to understand what’s real in JD Vance’s shape-shifting political beliefs or Trump’s meme coins. I fail to see what’s American in denying due process to someone like Abrego Garcia, or in repeatedly threatening our neighbors and allies with treaty cancellations and possible conquest, or in cavalierly mulling an unconstitutional third term, or in profiting from political office, or in arbitrarily sacking senior military officers and national security officials because a conspiracy theorist deems them to be disloyal. I don’t grasp the connection between Making America Great Again while tanking that symbol of American greatness known as Wall Street — all in the name of an economically illiterate and diplomatically ruinous obsession with tariffs and trade deficits.
The United States is a vast and diverse country and an old and resilient democracy that won’t quickly fold into authoritarianism and illiberalism the way Russia or Hungary did. The habits of freedom, 250 years old, still run deep in our bones — deeper than anything this president can ruin over the next few years. But that certain idea of America that once typified us, and for which we were once so admired, is evaporating.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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