Welcome back to the United States of Trump, where the Constitution is like a cocktail napkin with some scribbles on it, where a unanimous Supreme Court ruling is given the same deference as a customer service complaint, and where the president’s daily intelligence briefing requires three Big Macs and a television tuned to Fox News.
If you thought we’d hit peak insanity, buckle up. Monday might go down as the most disturbing day yet in Trump’s second term. And that’s saying something, considering that the competition includes both the time Trump attacked another head of state in the Oval Office and the time he triggered a Wall Street panic with his so-called “Liberation Day.”
The new headliner is that Trump just effectively told the Supreme Court to go screw itself. The highest court in the land ruled unanimously that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national wrongfully deported, against a judge’s order, to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT mega-prison.
Trump’s answer: Nah.
To be fair, this wasn’t a solo act. It was full-blown Oval Office performance art — a dark comedy, starring El Salvador’s discount Mussolini, President Nayib Bukele; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; and White House advisor Stephen Miller.
They spun quite the yarn. According to Trump’s alternate reality, Garcia is a gang member (there is no evidence of this), which means he is a terrorist (uh, what?). On those grounds, it is supposedly okay to skip due process and dump him in the one country an immigration judge previously — and explicitly — said we couldn’t dump him in.
This kind of logic would make a kangaroo court blush.
And on top of all that — according to Miller’s warped interpretation — the Supreme Court actually ruled in Trump’s favor.
But see, that’s the point. Trump and his crew aren’t just undermining separation of powers, due process and the rule of law. They’re also redefining reality.
Bukele even chimed in with this gem: “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”
If Trump so much as hinted he wanted Garcia back, you know Bukele would be marching him to a private jet in a MAGA hoodie, while live-streaming it on TikTok with Kid Rock blasting in the background. But Trump has no interest in doing that.
One of Trump’s heroes, President Andrew Jackson, once (allegedly) said that Supreme Court Justice “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Nearly 200 years later, Trump is effectively saying the same thing.
One of the flaws in our system of government is the assumption that presidents will abide by Supreme Court rulings. So when the court tells the White House to “facilitate” Garcia’s release and Trump just shrugs it off, what exactly is Chief Justice John Roberts supposed to do? Dispatch Sam Alito with a butterfly net? Have Clarence Thomas fire off a sternly worded tweet?
Without a shared respect for the rule of law, the only real check on an aspiring authoritarian is a public unwilling to play along.
But here’s the kicker — they’re betting you won’t mind. That you’ll hear, “He’s an illegal immigrant anyway” and throw out the law, basic decency and the pillars of Western civilization like a stack of expired coupons.
Joe Sixpack probably has no clue that Garcia is a father, married to a U.S. citizen and that he fled El Salvador to escape the same sort of gang members he is now stuck with in a concrete cage. But Fox News won’t tell you that. And Team Trump is counting on the fact that if they wrap this atrocity in the flag, people will eat it up.
And if you think Trump’s efforts to intimidate and punish stops here — think again. Once the president decides a Supreme Court ruling is a mere a suggestion and the word “terrorist” means “anyone we don’t like,” it doesn’t take much to imagine who’s next on the list.
Spoiler alert: It ain’t just the guys with tattoos and Spanish names. Trump said it out loud: “Home-growns are next.”
That’s right, folks. Trump talked about El Salvador building five more “places” — mega-prisons, concentration camps, call them what you want — for domestic American troublemakers.
But don’t worry. He’d never use them on anyone who didn’t deserve it. Right?
I mean, it’s not like this guy ever tried to overturn a legitimate election, right?
It’s not like he ever tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power, or joked about a third term, or threatened law firms, or weaponized the Justice Department against whistleblowers, right?
It’s not like he’s referred to journalists and political opponents as “enemies of the people” or “human scum,” right?
Well gee, what do you do with “enemies of the people,” America? That’s not a rhetorical question.
Matt K. Lewis is a columnist, podcaster and author of the books “Too Dumb to Fail” and “Filthy Rich Politicians.”