Trump’s Worldwide Scam

Administration hoses Bukele, Xinis, and the American people

Hi everyone – Today’s dispatch was written before the important news out of the Southern District of Texas, where a Trump-appointed judge this morning issued a meticulous 36-page opinion holding unlawful the Administration’s bizarre interpretation of the Alien Enemies Act. The judge specified that the Administration’s efforts to characterize the presence in the country of some number of Tren De Aragua gang members could not constitute a “predatory invasion” by a foreign country. He went through a methodical historical analysis of the term “invasion,” allowing a somewhat broader construction then the one urged by Plaintiffs, but not broad enough to cover the Administration’s extremely elastic interpretation.

I provided my immediate take on the opinion in a Substack Live with Adam Klasfeld, and a longer, more considered, but consistent explanation on YouTube.

More opinions on the lawfulness of the AEA interpretation will follow from the Southern District of New York and the District of Colorado. For now, this first blow constitutes an emphatic rejection of the Administration’s entire basis for its deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. It’s an issue that likely will require the Supreme Court to weigh in. But while the Administration searches for a more hospitable court, they have a huge problem on their hands. The ruling means that every prisoner that the country took to CECOT—no matter how demonstrably violent—is there unlawfully; because the Administration relied on an unlawful interpretation of executive power. Cleaning up that mess will be a Herculean task.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Substack dispatch.

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Turns out that El Salvador’s 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, 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 US officials characterized as urgent, Bukele also wanted assurances that each of the deportees was a member of the transnational drug gang Tren de Aragua.

All of this has now been reported in a New York Times story documenting how Trump and the Administration played Bukele and El Salvador and how the cozy Oval Office photo-op between the two presidents papered over Trump’s failure to hold up his end of the bargain.

It turns out none of the deportees received the due process to which the Supreme Court unanimously held 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 in error.

In a revealing series of interviews surrounding 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.

Trump has been claiming since shortly after the U.S. 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.”)

Monsters, Inc.

And now Trump himself has given the lie to the claim. In an interview last week with ABC news, Trump admitted that “I could” get Abrego-Garcia back but he hasn’t tried.

Having made that admission, Trump is now in heavy propaganda mode to argue that the mistaken deportation of Abrego Garcia is a "no-harm-no foul” episode because Abrego-Garcia is actually a dangerous member of Tren de Aragua.

But there are too 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 Terry Moran pointed out had been doctored.

Moreover, he is back peddling 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.

Third, and more important, Trump is simply ignoring the unanimous opinion of the U.S. 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. After the Supreme Court sent the case back to Judge 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.

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, Abrego-Garcia's attorneys agreed to, and the judge granted a one-week reprieve. 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 towards bringing Abrego-Garcia back to the United States.

That week ended yesterday (Wednesday) and… surprise surprise… the administration had nothing to offer and returned to its prior intransigence. In fact, they requested a stay of discovery, which Judge Xinis promptly denied, ordering depositions in the case to be completed by the end of next week.

This latest in a long series 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 enough to entertain his suggestions, the last week drives home his many ways of wriggling out of that promise to the American people. Trump has an endless capacity for recharacterizing, or obfuscating, or shifting responsibility, or blaming Biden, or revising his comments. And of course, there is always the shameless lie.

A recent NPR poll found that 85% 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 homilies for suckers like Bukele, or Judge Xinis, or the American people.

Talk to you later.