From the moment coup-attempting convicted felon Donald Trump scuttled back into the White House, we've been hearing the phrase "constitutional crisis" on a daily basis. At this point, however, it's time to retire the phrase. The constitutional crisis has come and gone; we lost. The United States is well and truly under fascist rule.
That's the only reasonable interpretation of Monday's odious Oval Office presser between American authoritarian Trump and El Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele. Trump and white nationalist aide Stephen Miller made it crystal clear that they intend to ignore the unanimous Supreme Court decision requiring the administration to "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an asylum seeker "mistakenly" deported to a notorious El Salvadoran prison labor camp under the auspices of Trump's stomach-churningly claims that the United States is at "war" with a Venezuelan street gang nobody had ever heard of before his fascist aides invented the pretext.
The claim is that once the United States has contracted with a foreign torture prison to impose life imprisonment on someone, that's it. It doesn't matter what the courts say because that person is in the torture prison's jurisdiction now, not the Supreme Court's. And so the court can, in no uncertain terms, eat shit.
Trump can't get the prisoner released because Bukele won't let him, and Bukele can't get him released because the United States won't let him. That's what they're going with, and the fact that this is the narrative they're going with demonstrates yet again that none of the people in this room have the cleverness of a goldfish.
The press event began with a casual aside that the two criminal strongmen may or may not have wanted to be videotaped: Trump telling Bukele he needs to build "about five more" similar prisons because the Trump administration intends to begin imprisoning US citizens abroad as well.
Trump confirmed this intent later in the meeting as well.
It appears that Stephen Miller is the primary "architect," if the word even applies to something so dimwitted and transparently criminal, of this Supreme Court defiance. At minimum, Miller's expansive claims about the case should now make him a target of possible contempt proceedings.
But the Supreme Court largely signaled they would allow the Trump regime to "disappear" even Americans when they mumbled their way into a 9-0 unsigned opinion only demanding the government "facilitate" the return of the wrongly imprisoned man—the precise evasion that Miller, Marco Rubio and the rest immediately seized on. And, above all, the Roberts Court is defined by Chief Justice John Roberts' own gutlessness; at every point, in the Republican descent into lawless fascism, it has been Roberts and his allies that have written in the loopholes retroactively undoing whatever parts of the Constitution the movement last bulldozed over.
If there is justice to be done, it may have to be done from The Hague, not from our own courts.
It's telling that even as racist big toe Miller and the rest lay out the precise plan by which even US citizens can now to be spirited out of the country and into foreign torture prisons, no trials necessary and all "mistakes" made permanent, Republican lawmakers even now remain silent. The silence is treason against our democracy.
The Supreme Court. Republican "lawmakers," though they can hardly be called that now. The major law firms. Elon Musk, the technocrats, and the billionaire enablers of fascism's rise. The media outlets that have engaged in a decade-long orgy of attacks against the rule of law with justifications even for violent attempted coup, if votes alone are not enough to cement hard-right rule.
The only non-violent means of resistance to the collapse of the rule of law hinges on one or more of these groups refusing to abet it—and that is still not happening. Trump's ratty little aides are openly mocking the laws that would constrain them, and the Republican Senate, especially, closes its eyes and cowers. There is no path back to democracy that does not purge each of these abettors; the whole fascist experiment must be disowned and expelled if anyone, anywhere in the world, is to believe that we are still a nation of law.
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