“… Trump has taken care to exclude any appointees who might hesitate on moral, legal, or practical grounds to implement his proposals. His most effective technique has been to
use January 6 as a screening device, filtering out any potential staff who condemn the insurrection or refuse to repeat his claim to have won the presidential election in 2020. Trump’s failed attempt to overturn that election posed a mortal threat to his career at the time, but what didn’t kill him made him stronger. The insurrection became the perfect tool to purge his party’s remaining pro-democracy faction.
… The combination of these changes has completely altered the character of advice Trump receives and the range of beliefs considered acceptable within his administration. With regard to democratic norms, the ideas circulating around Trump range from indifference to overt contempt. Where the first Trump administration contained a mix of authoritarian Trump loyalists and traditional Republicans, this one consists of authoritarian Trumpists egging one another on.
… Trump’s showdown with the Supreme Court over the Abrego Garcia case has surfaced two ideas in particular that have been gestating for years on the right.
One is the use of deportation authority not only to enforce immigration law but to intimidate Trump’s political critics.
Another is to defy court orders.
… Vance has been publicly floating the idea of ignoring court orders for years. “If I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance
said of Trump in 2021. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” He has repeated versions of this idea in subsequent
interviews.
Why has the administration risked the brinkmanship of defying a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in order to sustain its policy of disappearing people without due process, when it has so many other available tools to handle border enforcement? Possibly it is just extremely stubborn. But there is also considerable evidence that the administration wants to preserve this constitutional loophole in order to use it more broadly to intimidate opponents.
… Trump stated that he wants to expand deportations to El Salvador to American citizens.
… The president depicted this method as a response to hardened criminals. (This is scarcely a defense—even the worst offenders are entitled to the protections of the Constitution.) But it’s important to understand that Trump habitually equates opposition, or any deviation from his goals, with illegality. He has labeled as criminals all three of his electoral opponents, a wide swath of media organizations, and many other people who made the mistake of publicly criticizing or disagreeing with him.
Just days before his meeting with Bukele, he ordered the Justice Department to investigate the former cybersecurity official Chris Krebs for having “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”
Trump’s allies in the administration have adopted this habit. Elon Musk has
called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” Republican politicians and media routinely depict protests against Tesla as part of a conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism, conflating a tiny handful of acts of vandalism with mass-scale peaceful protests.
… Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer who has worked with the administration, told
Axios last month. In 2023, Davis posted threats to denaturalize and deport the anti-Trump opinion journalists Mehdi Hasan and Tim Miller: “
@mehdirhasan is now on my Lists 2 (indict), 4 (detain), 6 (denaturalize), and 3 (deport). I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag. But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with
@Timodc. So these whiny leftists don’t get beat up as often.”
These threats probably contain an element of performative trolling. But one
pattern of Trumpism is that its most outrageous notions appear first as jokes, allowing them to be processed and denuded of shock value, before eventually being assimilated into Trump’s actual policy platform.
… After Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to inquire about the status of Abrego Garcia, the “Trump War Room,” the official account of the president’s political operation,
posted a photo mock-up depicting Van Hollen covered in gang tattoos, as if to suggest that he, too, belongs in Bukele’s dungeon. In the sea of ideas in which Trump and his advisers swim, deporting the libs is an established trope. …”
“…
The Occam’s-razor explanation is that these people genuinely want to deport their political opponents without due process. The administration has certainly claimed the power that would enable it to do so.
“They have the temerity to say that every single invader should get their own individual judicial trial before they are deported,” Miller
ranted on Fox News earlier this month.
“One at a time, each one gets a $1 million trial in front of a communist judge to decide whether or not we can send them home.”
Without due process, of course, an “invader” is simply anybody Trump labels as such. …”
www.lawfaremedia.org
—> A Loophole That Would Swallow the Constitution
