Turns out
that El Salvador 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 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 hundred-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 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 them
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 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 a 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.
But for
those of us gullible to entertain his suggestions, the last week drives home
his many ways of wriggling out 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 a full 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.
The post Shame: Bukele Cares More About Abrego Garcia’s Rights than Trump Does appeared first on New Republic.
