Trump is incapable of governing in a way that benefits America as a whole, but he is an evil genius at manipulating low information, single-issue voters and unprincipled careerists into supporting his grifts and whatever gratifies his ego. He seems focused on gaining money and power and seems less concerned about retaining support of the voters, which could motivate a few Republicans concerned about re-election to start to be less totally supportive of all of his contradictory statements and counterproductive actions. Americans need to protest in much greater numbers to motivate nervous Republican and weak-kneed Democratic members of Congress to start to defy President Trump before he becomes President-for-Life Trump. We can hope that his malignant narcissism will impel him to act in more disgusting and frightening ways that may cause him to lose popular support even more rapidly than he has up until now (though unfortunately he may never lose the support of his cult members).
My worry is that it also rests on some extremely illiberal sources too. If this gets much worse, a large chunk of society's elite - especially, I think, a Tech Right dismayed at watching their industry smashed by Trump's stupidity but still dismissive of old-school checks and balances - would support a military coup.
Strangely, the single biggest part of the authoritarian playbook that Trump and his arcade cabinet just can never seem to manage is getting the military firmly behind him. Law enforcement, sure, with its bunker mentality and existing authoritarian culture ,they'll forever love Trump even after he got cops hurt and killed on Jan 6; but not the military. Part of it is that they just don't understand the modern DoD, but they're also just incredibly tin-eared. They keep playing fast and loose with national security, insulting military sacrifices and virtues, and just generally being jerks to the military. They seem to have assumed that because they're Manly Men Who Say Manly Things that the DoD will worship them, they mistake professional obedience to authority for agreement, and they assume that any resistance is remnants of "woke" to be purged by further degrading those virtues and destroying morale.
Put that all together, and I don't know what will happen when a military he's degraded and insulted faces a clear case where Trump is flouting the Constitution, where neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem up to the job of holding him to account. A lot of people might breathe a sigh of relief, but I can't help looking at places like Turkey and Burma.
Once that seal is broken, the US in the long term is probably cooked as a democracy. It might temporarily get back on track, but it would be too easy for the military to start thinking of itself as a coequal fourth branch of government, tempted to "correct" smaller issues with a sledgehammer, but also too clear to future Trumps where the vulnerabilities still are. No part of society trusts the rest enough to have a constitutional convention, which I think would be necessary to come back from that.
I'm very uneasy too, but less so about our military.
Because, our US Military Oath of Enlistment reads as follows:
I, (John/Jane Doe), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Allegiance is FIRST to our Constitution and only to the President as a means to that end.
The President and every single member of Congress swears a similar oath. They all rely on each other to have that allegiance to the Constitution; what happens when there is a President who plainly repudiates the Constitution and his oath to it, who seems to think that an oath (his and everyone else’s) is just theatrical bullshit? I have great faith in our military, but I don’t even know what *I* would do when two parts of an oath I swore are in conflict.
Solid points John and me either re the type of conflict you suggest.
On the positive side, our officer class almost all have 4 year college degrees and, hopefully, this is a stabilizing factor. Also, betraying our Constitution would, I think, make enlisted perpetrators subject to sanction via a strict code that deeply values rules and obedience.
For the record, I've worked with a number of DoD officers over the years, and every one of them has been a stellar person - completely trustworthy except for the one Colonel who left me stranded at the airport. I do not envy anyone who has taken an oath and takes it seriously, right now.
Great article, as always. But it’s striking that you continue to defend Elon and portray him as a great thinker and hyper competent.
DOGE in no way has been competent. It has achieved none of its goals and firing IRS agents will erase any of the very minor progress they’ve made. Aside from that, though, Elon has aided and abetted the authoritarian more than any single person. His website continues to be the biggest incubator of right wing slop and MAGA sentiments.
Personally, he has utterly failed at the game of politics and arguably did so on literal day 1, where he sieg heiled TWICE.
I wonder why you continue to defend a guy that, as great at business building as he may be, is an enabler of authoritarianism and the biggest propagator of right wing propaganda in the literal world?
Noah is defending Elon because they go to the same parties and run in the same social circles in the bay. Getting invited to the next White Party is way more important to Noah than some abstract thing like defending our democracy or fighting creeping fascism. It takes real courage to say 25% of your friends support the person most enabling a would be dictator.
I think you might be misunderstanding Noah's position on Elon. As the risk of putting words in Noah's mouth, he's not defending Elon as a good person or saying the guy is a universal genius. I believe he's pointing out - correctly - that Elon has a proven history of pulling off large projects that require significant organizational and motivational skills. Reminding people to respect a downed power line isn't the same as defending there being a live wire on the ground.
And, assuming I interpreted him correctly, I agree. With the backing of a President who doesn't care about laws, and in possession of both an enormous fortune and a major media outlet, it would be very unwise to assume Elon's going to fail in his goals. He has an enormous capacity to achieve his ends, and does not seem terribly stable. Without having a good model of what he can actually realistically accomplish (he doesn't have one either), it makes more sense to assume competence and be pleasantly surprised by his failures, than to assume ineptitude and be unpleasantly surprised when he pulls off something we assumed he couldn't.
Hard to disagree that Trump will struggle to get big things done. But the horror of the “little things” he is getting done is still devastating and more than enough to end our democracy.
"I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
"So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."
Time to fight for our freedoms. The American "patriots" who loudly and proudly voted for this always talked a big game about how "we fight for our freedoms."
I'll quote Martin Sheen from the West Wing, Noah. What's next?
I hope that's your next article. We need a call to action.
The problem with courts trying to stop Presidents from breaking the law is how do you enforce rulings on a Presidential administration? If Trump has been able to con someone in the administration into doing something illegal without leaving any evidence that he ordered them to do it, then you can at least go after the individual - as happened with a few people during his first stint in office. But if he owns these actions and it's clear that people are simply obeying the chain of command, what are you going to do? Arrest Trump in the Oval Office? Have the FBI storm Mar-a-Lago? That's what he'd make you do, to the hysterical objections and distortions of senior Republican politicians and the suddenly re-energised MAGA faithful. The law has to be backed by some form of power legitimised by being grounded in the electoral system. But that's not going to be the Republican Party in Congress at the moment, is it. Because in a two party system the Republican party is forced to be too broad a church. (the Democrats too). The US is an incredibly diverse country, but it has to squeeze all that diversity into just two parties. The two main parties both need parties outside them on the political spectrum which can serve as their radical flank and represent non-centrist views. These parties of the far right and left need to be able to get some sort of voice in Congress or they'll set up camp outside the formal political process and start getting violent. With three or more parties in play when there's a threat to the political system, the grown-up parties can form a temporary coalition to squeeze out the threat. That's what happened in Poland. But with only two parties both have to try to accommodate the extremes on their respective sides of the political fence with the result that the entire party risks getting dragged out to a fringe it probably doesn't really believe in. (They have no real choice: the job of politicians in a democracy is to represent part of the electorate, bringing it into the arena of political debate and influence - 'There go the people, I must follow them for I am their leader' etc). Vance used to think Trump was Hitler until it became clear that he had captured the Republican party's collective imagination. At that point, if he wanted to continue to be relevant in his chosen career, he had to proclaim him the new messiah! In continental Europe Proportional Representation systems help prevent contamination of centrist parties from the extremes. That's what the US needs. Don't waste this crisis. PR now!
Rob Ford seems like a similar case, no? I wouldn’t thought Trump in America would be impossible, but the idiocy that led to him seems to be pretty widespread
Trump is worse than King Charles I of England. He could not raise taxes without the permission of Parliament, but they kept refusing to raise taxes (they were the people who paid the taxes). Charles dissolved Parliament and spent 11 years trying to collect taxes on matters which taxes did not apply. This continued until 1640 when he recalled Parliament, which shortly afterwards led to the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles for treason in 1649. Trump is picking a fight with all the constitutional bodies that make up the Union. He is even picking a fight with Harvard University. Has he no friends who will advise him that these people will eventually take their revenge?
Well, when Americans are not trust their institutions (Congress, Supreme Court for example have double-digits percent net negative trust), then who really cares when Trump picked fight against all of it (especially conservatives)?
I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country than I have with actual Venezuelan gang members being sent to El Salvador. Deporting illegal immigrants is fine, but they should be deported to their home countries or back to one of the countries that let them walk through without applying for asylum there- eg a Venezuelan arriving from Mexico can be returned there (or turned away at the border). I don’t think the US should be sending anyone but Salvadorans to El Salvador. Seems like kidnapping to send a Venezuelan to El Salvador.
"I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country"
I know it's popular these days to pretend that US law is "whatever seems reasonable during an Internet conversation," but I'm pretty sure we have a whole system of laws about when we can deport people and where we can deport them. Part of this is that deporting people to their home country is often a literal death sentence.
No- he entered the country as an illegal alien and years later married an American citizen (I believe his green card application following his marriage was rejected because of allegations of gang ties, if I am reading things correctly, but who knows?). The one thing he had going for him was a judges ruling that he should not be deported to El Salvador due to his claim he feared gang retribution. Of course, the same gangs would have no trouble at all finding him in the US as he owned a Salvadoran restaurant serving the Salvadoran community. Normally this means he would pay protection money to gangs and buy some of his supplies from gang-affiliated suppliers. This is the equivalent of a Sicilian saying they fled to the US because of mafia persecution…..and then opened up a pizzeria in Little Italy.
Because of the previous court order (as badly reasoned as it may be), he should not have been deported to El Salvador. Guantanamo or a third country would have been fine, but as he had no criminal record he shouldn’t have been a priority for deportation at all, IMO, illegal though he is.
What is this whole pile of drivel about Salvadoran gangs hunting him down in the US? Come on, I know 4chan is gone but please don’t bring that level of discourse to this blog.
Or I guess if he had been granted asylum status it wasn’t even a loophole as it wasn’t pending asylum hearing? As far as I understand the loop hole is showing up and claiming asylum status and then being able to stay until you hearing which is years in the future as the backlog is ridiculous.
So it seems to me some people who question whether we should take in asylum seekers at all just don’t care that much about this man, but Trump ignoring the law and defying judges should be alarming to anyone.
So ultimately, he was here legally with asylum status though right? I get that the asylum loophole caused issues to say the least, but bottom line he was ultimately legally allowed to reside in the US, had no proven criminal record and was mistakenly scooped up. Now Trump is deliberately obscuring things to make it sound like he was not here legally and was a criminal.
The left also obscures the fact that he entered illegally and was later granted asylum status, which basically means if asylum reforms were in place he wouldn’t be here legally and could be deported.
But he was here legally and should not have been deported, especially to a freaking prison!
He was an illegal alien. There was a court order prohibiting his deportation to one country- El Salvador. That is not asylum status.
Fully agree he should not have been deported in this manner, nor to El Salvador without an appeal of the court ruling (which was a dubious as his alleged gang affiliation).
Ok so the distinction is he had "withholding of removal" status, not asylum status, and upon researching this further, this means he does have some rights to work legally and things like that, but to your earlier point, does not protect him from being deported to other countries, nor does it lead to a chance for a green card or citizenship. But with the status, he was legally allowed to live and work in the US. It would also be legal to deport him to a different country. But wouldn't having withholding of removal status, as narrow as it is, still be distinct from being an illegal alien?
I appreciate you engaging in this discussion - I wish we could all be clear on exactly what is happening here.
A good comparison with the Trump's fiasco in El Salvador is the Australian government policy of detailing boat people in offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Christmas Island!
Unfortunately this policy is bipartisan, and the government said that it's effective in deterring illegal migrants and human trafficking, so even though these centres are riddled with abuse and bad living conditions, being targeted by human rights organisations, most Australians don't really care about it!
to the routine use of blackmail and extortion as a means of executing policy instead of taking the legitimate path of proposing laws, securing votes, seeking consensus.
We have 4 more years of this, and over this time, the administration will continually discover new ways that it has leverage to feed this extortion and blackmail racket.
No president to my knowledge exercised their blackmail power in this way.
No disagreement here. It's just that the federal government is not a startup. It doesn't need to grow revenue/profits at x% YoY. It exists to provide reliable services to it's consumers. The focus of DOGE should have been on that. Define metrics, measure them, try to improve on those. He has been an absolute disaster at this and no amount of lying (by him and DOGE) is going to change that.
Musk was the arm candy that Trump needed to convince voters that he was the best choice for businesses and the economy. Beyond that, he didn't have any purpose in the most incompetent administration of my lifetime. Coming after Biden, they had a very low bar to clear and they couldn't even do that.
"The administration later admitted that his arrest had been an error — Garcia had been granted court protection against deportation, but Trump’s people grabbed him anyway."
That is not correct. Gracia had actually been *approved* for deportation, with all appropriate due process. He was just specifically not supposed to go back to El Salvador.
I really don't understand the focus on this guy. There are much more sympathetic people who didn't receive any due process.
I thought it was announced that it was only an administrative error that led to him being deported. No one made any allegations against him that had any substance, and certainly not due process, from anything that Trump said before yesterday.
That is from the Suprem Court docket for this case. The document is a ruling from the lower court denying a request from the government's. It refers to an alleged order of removal allowing him to be removed, along with an acknowledged protective order that says he cannot be removed to El Salvador. I say "alleged" only because the order is not part of the record for this case. Which makes sense, because it is not disputed that the removal was in violation of the protective order, so the related order allowing removal is not relevant. But I haven't seen anything reliable disputing the existence of a removal order.
(I'm not an immigration attorney, so I might be using the wrong terms for some of these things.)
If I get detained in El Salvador. Tell my family I am part of a gang. We the people.
To summarize, our democracy's future rests on a prayer the wack job's illiberal, brain stem impulses can't be organized by a cortex.
Discomforting is an understatement.
Trump is incapable of governing in a way that benefits America as a whole, but he is an evil genius at manipulating low information, single-issue voters and unprincipled careerists into supporting his grifts and whatever gratifies his ego. He seems focused on gaining money and power and seems less concerned about retaining support of the voters, which could motivate a few Republicans concerned about re-election to start to be less totally supportive of all of his contradictory statements and counterproductive actions. Americans need to protest in much greater numbers to motivate nervous Republican and weak-kneed Democratic members of Congress to start to defy President Trump before he becomes President-for-Life Trump. We can hope that his malignant narcissism will impel him to act in more disgusting and frightening ways that may cause him to lose popular support even more rapidly than he has up until now (though unfortunately he may never lose the support of his cult members).
My worry is that it also rests on some extremely illiberal sources too. If this gets much worse, a large chunk of society's elite - especially, I think, a Tech Right dismayed at watching their industry smashed by Trump's stupidity but still dismissive of old-school checks and balances - would support a military coup.
Strangely, the single biggest part of the authoritarian playbook that Trump and his arcade cabinet just can never seem to manage is getting the military firmly behind him. Law enforcement, sure, with its bunker mentality and existing authoritarian culture ,they'll forever love Trump even after he got cops hurt and killed on Jan 6; but not the military. Part of it is that they just don't understand the modern DoD, but they're also just incredibly tin-eared. They keep playing fast and loose with national security, insulting military sacrifices and virtues, and just generally being jerks to the military. They seem to have assumed that because they're Manly Men Who Say Manly Things that the DoD will worship them, they mistake professional obedience to authority for agreement, and they assume that any resistance is remnants of "woke" to be purged by further degrading those virtues and destroying morale.
Put that all together, and I don't know what will happen when a military he's degraded and insulted faces a clear case where Trump is flouting the Constitution, where neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem up to the job of holding him to account. A lot of people might breathe a sigh of relief, but I can't help looking at places like Turkey and Burma.
Once that seal is broken, the US in the long term is probably cooked as a democracy. It might temporarily get back on track, but it would be too easy for the military to start thinking of itself as a coequal fourth branch of government, tempted to "correct" smaller issues with a sledgehammer, but also too clear to future Trumps where the vulnerabilities still are. No part of society trusts the rest enough to have a constitutional convention, which I think would be necessary to come back from that.
I'm very uneasy too, but less so about our military.
Because, our US Military Oath of Enlistment reads as follows:
I, (John/Jane Doe), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Allegiance is FIRST to our Constitution and only to the President as a means to that end.
The President and every single member of Congress swears a similar oath. They all rely on each other to have that allegiance to the Constitution; what happens when there is a President who plainly repudiates the Constitution and his oath to it, who seems to think that an oath (his and everyone else’s) is just theatrical bullshit? I have great faith in our military, but I don’t even know what *I* would do when two parts of an oath I swore are in conflict.
Solid points John and me either re the type of conflict you suggest.
On the positive side, our officer class almost all have 4 year college degrees and, hopefully, this is a stabilizing factor. Also, betraying our Constitution would, I think, make enlisted perpetrators subject to sanction via a strict code that deeply values rules and obedience.
For the record, I've worked with a number of DoD officers over the years, and every one of them has been a stellar person - completely trustworthy except for the one Colonel who left me stranded at the airport. I do not envy anyone who has taken an oath and takes it seriously, right now.
Listened to this yesterday and I was impressed by how it was a few individuals that made a difference…
To Save Democracy, Here’s a Playbook That Works
Poland pulled back from an authoritarian slide. What can the U.S. learn from its nonpartisan approach?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/poland-democracy-us.html
Great article, as always. But it’s striking that you continue to defend Elon and portray him as a great thinker and hyper competent.
DOGE in no way has been competent. It has achieved none of its goals and firing IRS agents will erase any of the very minor progress they’ve made. Aside from that, though, Elon has aided and abetted the authoritarian more than any single person. His website continues to be the biggest incubator of right wing slop and MAGA sentiments.
Personally, he has utterly failed at the game of politics and arguably did so on literal day 1, where he sieg heiled TWICE.
I wonder why you continue to defend a guy that, as great at business building as he may be, is an enabler of authoritarianism and the biggest propagator of right wing propaganda in the literal world?
Noah is defending Elon because they go to the same parties and run in the same social circles in the bay. Getting invited to the next White Party is way more important to Noah than some abstract thing like defending our democracy or fighting creeping fascism. It takes real courage to say 25% of your friends support the person most enabling a would be dictator.
I think you might be misunderstanding Noah's position on Elon. As the risk of putting words in Noah's mouth, he's not defending Elon as a good person or saying the guy is a universal genius. I believe he's pointing out - correctly - that Elon has a proven history of pulling off large projects that require significant organizational and motivational skills. Reminding people to respect a downed power line isn't the same as defending there being a live wire on the ground.
And, assuming I interpreted him correctly, I agree. With the backing of a President who doesn't care about laws, and in possession of both an enormous fortune and a major media outlet, it would be very unwise to assume Elon's going to fail in his goals. He has an enormous capacity to achieve his ends, and does not seem terribly stable. Without having a good model of what he can actually realistically accomplish (he doesn't have one either), it makes more sense to assume competence and be pleasantly surprised by his failures, than to assume ineptitude and be unpleasantly surprised when he pulls off something we assumed he couldn't.
Bullies need to be confronted- Congratulations to Harvard and several courageous honest law firms
Where is decency in our federal government?
Hard to disagree that Trump will struggle to get big things done. But the horror of the “little things” he is getting done is still devastating and more than enough to end our democracy.
"I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
"So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."
Time to fight for our freedoms. The American "patriots" who loudly and proudly voted for this always talked a big game about how "we fight for our freedoms."
I'll quote Martin Sheen from the West Wing, Noah. What's next?
I hope that's your next article. We need a call to action.
Yes, but what does that mean, concretely? Poàsting online?
The first step is deciding where you stand and committing to it. All the other stuff comes later.
I am asking what to do, concretely, and hoping Noah makes a writeup on it.
Well that made me sad…
The problem with courts trying to stop Presidents from breaking the law is how do you enforce rulings on a Presidential administration? If Trump has been able to con someone in the administration into doing something illegal without leaving any evidence that he ordered them to do it, then you can at least go after the individual - as happened with a few people during his first stint in office. But if he owns these actions and it's clear that people are simply obeying the chain of command, what are you going to do? Arrest Trump in the Oval Office? Have the FBI storm Mar-a-Lago? That's what he'd make you do, to the hysterical objections and distortions of senior Republican politicians and the suddenly re-energised MAGA faithful. The law has to be backed by some form of power legitimised by being grounded in the electoral system. But that's not going to be the Republican Party in Congress at the moment, is it. Because in a two party system the Republican party is forced to be too broad a church. (the Democrats too). The US is an incredibly diverse country, but it has to squeeze all that diversity into just two parties. The two main parties both need parties outside them on the political spectrum which can serve as their radical flank and represent non-centrist views. These parties of the far right and left need to be able to get some sort of voice in Congress or they'll set up camp outside the formal political process and start getting violent. With three or more parties in play when there's a threat to the political system, the grown-up parties can form a temporary coalition to squeeze out the threat. That's what happened in Poland. But with only two parties both have to try to accommodate the extremes on their respective sides of the political fence with the result that the entire party risks getting dragged out to a fringe it probably doesn't really believe in. (They have no real choice: the job of politicians in a democracy is to represent part of the electorate, bringing it into the arena of political debate and influence - 'There go the people, I must follow them for I am their leader' etc). Vance used to think Trump was Hitler until it became clear that he had captured the Republican party's collective imagination. At that point, if he wanted to continue to be relevant in his chosen career, he had to proclaim him the new messiah! In continental Europe Proportional Representation systems help prevent contamination of centrist parties from the extremes. That's what the US needs. Don't waste this crisis. PR now!
As a boarder town Canadian, I am shocked the American people can accept this kind of leader.
We always thought as Michigan and the USA as a place to go that was “across the river” not a hostile place with an authoritarian government.
I do agree with the Fentanyl & immigration policies being too lax and Canada should have a larger military budget.
However most of the rest of this government shares the heck out of, and should scare everyone.
Rob Ford seems like a similar case, no? I wouldn’t thought Trump in America would be impossible, but the idiocy that led to him seems to be pretty widespread
Why think we can accept it?
Trump is worse than King Charles I of England. He could not raise taxes without the permission of Parliament, but they kept refusing to raise taxes (they were the people who paid the taxes). Charles dissolved Parliament and spent 11 years trying to collect taxes on matters which taxes did not apply. This continued until 1640 when he recalled Parliament, which shortly afterwards led to the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles for treason in 1649. Trump is picking a fight with all the constitutional bodies that make up the Union. He is even picking a fight with Harvard University. Has he no friends who will advise him that these people will eventually take their revenge?
Well, when Americans are not trust their institutions (Congress, Supreme Court for example have double-digits percent net negative trust), then who really cares when Trump picked fight against all of it (especially conservatives)?
I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country than I have with actual Venezuelan gang members being sent to El Salvador. Deporting illegal immigrants is fine, but they should be deported to their home countries or back to one of the countries that let them walk through without applying for asylum there- eg a Venezuelan arriving from Mexico can be returned there (or turned away at the border). I don’t think the US should be sending anyone but Salvadorans to El Salvador. Seems like kidnapping to send a Venezuelan to El Salvador.
"I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country"
I know it's popular these days to pretend that US law is "whatever seems reasonable during an Internet conversation," but I'm pretty sure we have a whole system of laws about when we can deport people and where we can deport them. Part of this is that deporting people to their home country is often a literal death sentence.
My view is that we should simply obey those laws.
The entire concept that someone can be here illegally but also can't be deported is insanity.
It isn't the slightest bit insane. It's due process. It is basically one of our founding principles.
Literally in the Declaration of Independence.
“Pretty sure” 😂.
Do they have to send them to a torture prison, though? How about just sending them back to their town?
Yeah, I know. I guess I just figure maybe you have a chance to quickly run and hide if you're not DIRECTLY taken to the torture prison.
was he not here legally?
No- he entered the country as an illegal alien and years later married an American citizen (I believe his green card application following his marriage was rejected because of allegations of gang ties, if I am reading things correctly, but who knows?). The one thing he had going for him was a judges ruling that he should not be deported to El Salvador due to his claim he feared gang retribution. Of course, the same gangs would have no trouble at all finding him in the US as he owned a Salvadoran restaurant serving the Salvadoran community. Normally this means he would pay protection money to gangs and buy some of his supplies from gang-affiliated suppliers. This is the equivalent of a Sicilian saying they fled to the US because of mafia persecution…..and then opened up a pizzeria in Little Italy.
Because of the previous court order (as badly reasoned as it may be), he should not have been deported to El Salvador. Guantanamo or a third country would have been fine, but as he had no criminal record he shouldn’t have been a priority for deportation at all, IMO, illegal though he is.
What is this whole pile of drivel about Salvadoran gangs hunting him down in the US? Come on, I know 4chan is gone but please don’t bring that level of discourse to this blog.
You know absolutely nothing on this subject.
Or I guess if he had been granted asylum status it wasn’t even a loophole as it wasn’t pending asylum hearing? As far as I understand the loop hole is showing up and claiming asylum status and then being able to stay until you hearing which is years in the future as the backlog is ridiculous.
So it seems to me some people who question whether we should take in asylum seekers at all just don’t care that much about this man, but Trump ignoring the law and defying judges should be alarming to anyone.
So ultimately, he was here legally with asylum status though right? I get that the asylum loophole caused issues to say the least, but bottom line he was ultimately legally allowed to reside in the US, had no proven criminal record and was mistakenly scooped up. Now Trump is deliberately obscuring things to make it sound like he was not here legally and was a criminal.
The left also obscures the fact that he entered illegally and was later granted asylum status, which basically means if asylum reforms were in place he wouldn’t be here legally and could be deported.
But he was here legally and should not have been deported, especially to a freaking prison!
He was an illegal alien. There was a court order prohibiting his deportation to one country- El Salvador. That is not asylum status.
Fully agree he should not have been deported in this manner, nor to El Salvador without an appeal of the court ruling (which was a dubious as his alleged gang affiliation).
Ok so the distinction is he had "withholding of removal" status, not asylum status, and upon researching this further, this means he does have some rights to work legally and things like that, but to your earlier point, does not protect him from being deported to other countries, nor does it lead to a chance for a green card or citizenship. But with the status, he was legally allowed to live and work in the US. It would also be legal to deport him to a different country. But wouldn't having withholding of removal status, as narrow as it is, still be distinct from being an illegal alien?
I appreciate you engaging in this discussion - I wish we could all be clear on exactly what is happening here.
A good comparison with the Trump's fiasco in El Salvador is the Australian government policy of detailing boat people in offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Christmas Island!
Unfortunately this policy is bipartisan, and the government said that it's effective in deterring illegal migrants and human trafficking, so even though these centres are riddled with abuse and bad living conditions, being targeted by human rights organisations, most Australians don't really care about it!
We are already there due
to the routine use of blackmail and extortion as a means of executing policy instead of taking the legitimate path of proposing laws, securing votes, seeking consensus.
We have 4 more years of this, and over this time, the administration will continually discover new ways that it has leverage to feed this extortion and blackmail racket.
No president to my knowledge exercised their blackmail power in this way.
"Elon is incredible at building businesses"
No disagreement here. It's just that the federal government is not a startup. It doesn't need to grow revenue/profits at x% YoY. It exists to provide reliable services to it's consumers. The focus of DOGE should have been on that. Define metrics, measure them, try to improve on those. He has been an absolute disaster at this and no amount of lying (by him and DOGE) is going to change that.
Musk was the arm candy that Trump needed to convince voters that he was the best choice for businesses and the economy. Beyond that, he didn't have any purpose in the most incompetent administration of my lifetime. Coming after Biden, they had a very low bar to clear and they couldn't even do that.
"The administration later admitted that his arrest had been an error — Garcia had been granted court protection against deportation, but Trump’s people grabbed him anyway."
That is not correct. Gracia had actually been *approved* for deportation, with all appropriate due process. He was just specifically not supposed to go back to El Salvador.
I really don't understand the focus on this guy. There are much more sympathetic people who didn't receive any due process.
The supreme court told Trump to bring him back. What is your problem?
No, they didn't. The district court ordered that. The Supreme Court explicitly changed that aspect.
I thought it was announced that it was only an administrative error that led to him being deported. No one made any allegations against him that had any substance, and certainly not due process, from anything that Trump said before yesterday.
The removal order is discussed here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A949/354884/20250407124131372_24A949%20Abrego%20Garcia%20Letter%20FINAL.pdf
That is from the Suprem Court docket for this case. The document is a ruling from the lower court denying a request from the government's. It refers to an alleged order of removal allowing him to be removed, along with an acknowledged protective order that says he cannot be removed to El Salvador. I say "alleged" only because the order is not part of the record for this case. Which makes sense, because it is not disputed that the removal was in violation of the protective order, so the related order allowing removal is not relevant. But I haven't seen anything reliable disputing the existence of a removal order.
(I'm not an immigration attorney, so I might be using the wrong terms for some of these things.)