Trumptatorship 3: Gangster Government

(This is the 3rd in a series of articles covering Donald Trump's efforts to end liberal democracy in the United States and replace it with authoritarian autocracy--a Trumptatorship--and the grim consequences of that. The 1st part is here, the second here.)

The U.S. Constitution vests the federal government's legislative power, including the power of the purse, in congress. The president's charge on this is that he "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." To change the constitution requires a constitutional amendment. All basic civics stuff, right? But since returning to the presidency in January, Donald Trump has asserted that he, in effect, has the power to unilaterally write and rewrite, ignore and alter laws, override federal, state and local laws he doesn't like, including eliminating entire agencies of the government created by congress, and even to change the constitution itself, all with nothing more than the stroke of a pen. The powers of a dictator, entirely outside the constitutional ambit of a president, directed toward destroying both the substance and the institutions of the liberal democracy.

In 2023, Trump had asserted that "for 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the President had the Constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as Impoundment."[1] The constitution grants no such power to the president, nor, contrary to Trump's Uranian "history," have presidents ever held that as any "constitutional power." Over five decades ago, then-President Richard Nixon advanced that notion and got it in his head to carry out a raft of impoundment efforts aimed at thwarting the policy objectives of congress. This led to the creation of the Impoundment Control Act (the ICA), which established procedures by which a president could request that congress--the body with legislative power--delay or rescind congressionally-appropriated funds. This was uncontroversial at the time--the final vote in the House of Representatives was 401-6, the Senate passed it unanimously and Nixon, not long before he was forced from office by the Watergate scandal, signed it into law. Since then, presidents of both parties, including Trump in his first term, have made liberal use of these procedures, and no president until Trump has ever asserted any "constitutional power" to impound; the notion began with Nixon and very swiftly ended with him, with even Tricky Dick conceding the point. As the cherry on top, the U.S. Supreme Court then ruled, in a case preceding the ICA but decided shortly after it, that Nixon had no power to impound money legally appropriated by congress in the Clean Water Act. The ruling was unanimous.[2] Trump was, of course, impeached after trying to impound security assistance to Ukraine as part of a scheme to force the Ukrainian government to announce a baseless investigation of his political rival Joe Biden. Then, during the 2024 campaign, Trump described the ICA as a "disaster of a law" that "is clearly unconstitutional" and, perhaps most bizarrely, "a blatant violation of the separation of powers." Just words, unconnected to anything in the real world.[3]

I spend a whole paragraph and some footnotes on that matter only to reinforce a point I made in the previous article of this series, one that will recur throughout the ones to come. Trump's stated position on impoundment authority is, like his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act against a prison gang, baseless rubbish cobbled together to provide a "well, he has to call it something" pretext for a dictator to go around the constitution and the body of laws adopted under it to do things he wants to do but that the constitution and the law don't allow him to do. It isn't some alternative theory of How These Things Work. No aspect of it even attempts to be a serious analysis, even a bad one. It's offered as frivolously as the most vacuous social-media troll-post and Trump doesn't really care about any of it. Yet he's asserting impoundment "power" he doesn't have and using it, in utter violation of the law, to try to impose sweeping policy changes he can't get through constitutional means, including dismembering wide swathes of government institutions established by those means.

Some more basic civics stuff: The constitution (Article I, Section 4) provides that "the Times, Places and Manner of" holding federal elections "shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations..." Congress has directly set rules for federal elections or, in some cases, delegated the authority to independent agencies it has established for the purpose but most election regulation is done by the states. The president is given no power whatsoever to make laws or rules regarding federal elections, yet on 25 March, Trump issued an executive order that purports to usurp the power to do so from congress and the states in direct contravention of the constitution and regulate federal elections in a number of ways that violate a raft of laws established over the years by the bodies with the actual constitutional authority to make them.

Trump orders that federal voter registration forms created over 30 years ago by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) be changed to require onerous "documentary proof of United States citizenship" and require that "a State or local official [is] to record on the form the type of document that the applicant presented as documentary proof of United States citizenship," both directly violating provisions of the NVRA.[4] Trump purports to order the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to "take appropriate action" within 30 days to "require" these changes and to "take all appropriate action to cease providing Federal funds to States that do not comply" with this rubbish--impoundment. But the EAC is an independent body created by congress as part of its constitutional duties to regulate elections; Trump has no more authority to direct it to do any of these things than he has to order someone to commit seppuku.[5] The federal funds the EAC provides to the states--for the maintenance of their election systems--are dispersed according to a formula established by law, not by the capricious edict of a dictator.

At present, 18 states accept mail-in votes that arrive shortly after election day as long as they were sent and postmarked before or on election day (state laws vary on this). The speed of the postal service is out of the voters' hands. Trump's order tries to impose an election-day deadline for receipt of such ballots. This is based on a very questionable interpretation of federal law, but based on that interpretation, not any clear directive, Trump is essentially trying to overturn laws in 18 states. He orders the Attorney General to take "all necessary action to enforce" this and pretends to order the EAC to "condition any available funding to a State on that State's compliance" with it. As before, he has no authority to either direct the EAC in this or to impound congressionally-allocated funds.

In the perhaps-naive belief that, with the civil society collapsing around their ears, the judicial branch will save America, voting-rights groups, civil rights groups, civil liberties groups and Democratic groups are suing the regime over all of this.

Some not-insignificant context here is that Trump's executive order came in the wake of the failure, last year, of the SAVE Act, an obnoxious piece of legislation created by corrupt MAGA congresscritter Chip Roy and endorsed by Trump, which contained versions of many of these same measures and would disenfranchise millions of Americans. Roy has reintroduced it in the current congress but it's unlikely to pass. With a legitimate path to creating such measures likely closed, Trump's EO seeks to will them into existence by dictatorial fiat.

What would a dictator be without a powerless minority to hate on and target, right? Only about 0.6% of Americans are transgender but Trump is marshaling the might of the U.S. government against them. He's already issued multiple quite ugly executive orders attacking transgender people and their rights--9 of them in his first 10 days in office alone, and he was just getting started. The toxic animus that gushes from them is appalling, mirroring Trump's vile anti-immigrant rhetoric from last year's campaign. One was directed, in part, toward what it called "restoring biological truth," adopting the language of outright Nazism. Among other things, it insisted that merely acknowledging the existence of trans people amounted to impermissible "gender ideology" and ordered his government to house trans women convicts in male prisons and deny them medical care. In another, targeting trans servicemembers, Trump, who, in his first term, pardoned and even promoted war criminals then fired the Secretary of the Navy for objecting, asserts that

"adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life.  A man's assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member."

Another defines medical treatment for gender dysphoria for young people as "the chemical and surgical mutilation of children," even when they're 18, and orders that his regime cut off all research or educational grants to medical institutions that provide medical care for the purpose of gender transition. But those grants are federal laws, withholding or conditioning them in this way a violation of the law, and Trump is asserting the power to repeal or alter the law, something a president--the reader may tire of hearing me point out--has absolutely no constitutional authority to do.[6]

In February, another such order declared "it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs" that refuse to exclude trans women--maliciously misgendered in this order as in the others as "men"--from women's sports. At the Governors Working Session at the White House a few weeks after that one, Trump randomly picked a public fight with Maine Gov. Janet Mills, threatening to illegally cut off federal funds to her state if she didn't move to, in accordance with his executive order, ban the 2 trans girl athletes in 2 of the 126 high-schools in Maine from competing in women's sports. "We're going to follow the law sir," Mills retorted. "We'll see you in court."

Trump cites as his authority for this Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal money, but, as ProPublica reported,

"Title IX has never required schools to exclude [trans athletes], and Trump's order can’t rewrite federal law, said Deborah Brake, a professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

"'The president can put out an executive order saying anything he wants,' Brake said, but 'there has never been a court decision interpreting Title IX to require the exclusion of transgender girls from girls' sports.'"

From the Maine Morning Star:

"[Title IX] does not explicitly say anything about trans students and can't be applied to exclude trans athletes from sports, [Rachel] Perera [of the Brookings Institution] said.

"'So I think they're also out on a limb there, where they are interpreting the law in a way that doesn’t reflect the law, which gives Maine more opportunity to push back,' she said.

"Rewriting Title IX would need approval from Congress..."

And at the other end, the Maine Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination against transgender people; the state would have to act in violation of its own laws to go along with Trump's legally-baseless EO.

The aftermath of Trump's effort to publicly bully Mills was extraordinary, a flurry of Trump regime agencies targeting Maine's educational institutions. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced an investigation of one school district in the state,

"after it was reported that Greely High School, a school under its jurisdiction, is continuing to allow at least one male student to compete in girls' categories."

Yes, those are their own words. This is happening even as Trump has ordered OCR to stop investigating the actual complaints about alleged race and sex-based discrimination that congress tasked it with fielding (and of which there is always a massive backlog). Trump's executive order directed federal agencies to "prioritize" these anti-trans actions. Whereas, the Maine Morning Star notes, "almost all OCR investigations were historically initiated due to complaints filed by agencies or individuals turning to the civil rights agency for help," under Trump, "those have taken a back seat and the office has pursued proactive 'directed investigations,' ordered by the administration." ProPublica reports that, starting only hours after the Trump/Mills dust-up, the first of what would eventually grow to six different Trump regime agencies came to target Maine, meaning that

"more federal agencies are pressing down on Maine than there are transgender girls competing in girls' sports in the state. Only two transgender girls are competing this school year, according to the Maine Principals' Association."

It's also, of course, the case that these "investigations" are a sham--just another example of a dictator manufacturing a pretext for doing the dictator shit he wants to do. "Not ordinary," as ProPublica, with somewhat greater restraint than is merited, puts it. The Department of Health and Human Services, for example, doesn't really enforce civil rights laws in schools but at Trump's order, it launched an "investigation," and while such inquiries typically take "months, if not years," Trump's HHS decreed, after only one business day, that Maine was guilty of violating Title IX without having interviewed a single relevant official in the state. And so on. David Webber, a Maine civil rights attorney, pretty much hit the nail on the head when he dismissed these inquiries as "a show."

"'It's a political move dressed up, very barely, with a legal process, but it's a fake legal process. So it is very concerning because they're not even trying to make it look like it's due process,' he said."

Whatever one thinks about transgender athletes, this is the President of the United States not only insisting he has the power to, in effect, unilaterally rewrite federal law then use his rewrite to override a state's own (democratically-enacted) laws but fanatically weaponizing the entire federal government to try to dictate the policy of a pair of local high schools in one small state.

This is happening alongside Republican efforts in congress to amend Title IX in exactly the way Trump's EO pretends to do. The GOP bill narrowly passed the House in January but is unlikely to pass in the Senate, so Trump just issued an EO and pretends the whim of a dictator accomplished the same thing.

Trump has been on a rampage through various agencies of the government on the pretense of targeting "waste, fraud and abuse." Trump's commitment to combating those things is rather jarringly belied by his illegal mass-firings, across the government, of inspectors general--the officials charged with investigating and putting a stop to those things at federal agencies--but, y'know, Trumptatorship.[7] Alongside disposing of the legally-designated cops on the WF&A beat, Trump willed into existence the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), a sort of fake "agency" that, operating outside the bounds of the legitimate government, is allegedly supposed to root out these bugaboos. DOGE is either led by billionaire Trump mega-donor Elon Musk or not, depending on what day--and what court--is asking. That ambiguity is emblematic of everything about DOGE, which many progressive commentators have correctly characterized as a "coup." The "agency" wasn't created by congress but by another of Trump's executive orders, and with seemingly little or none of the vetting, background checks or adherence to conflict-of-interest rules required of employees of actual government agencies, this fake "agency" has been allowed unprecedented access to real federal agencies, combing through, among other things, payment systems and all manner of sensitive government records on Americans. The world of dire concerns this alone raises about things like privacy and information security becomes a galaxy of alarm in the face of the regime's insistence on resisting any real transparency regarding DOGE's activities. While Musk has said DOGE is working inside nearly every federal agency, Trump has engaged in a shell-game aimed at corruptly concealing most details about it and its operations. ProPublica reports,

"Most of DOGE's money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority.

"The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE's staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were.

"The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can't shield its records from the public. If it's not an agency, then DOGE's tens of millions of dollars in funding weren't legally allocated and should be returned, some contend."

Musk's companies receive billions in government contracts, with no end to the potential conflicts of interest in his being involved in this, but--inspiring as much confidence as the rest of this enterprise--he's keeping his finances secret. While DOGE hasn't found any "waste" or "fraud" or "abuse," it has joined Trump in perpetuating a fraud on the public by copiously slapping those labels on federal spending--passed into law by the body constitutionally authorized to spend--that Trump dislikes and purporting to cancel it.[8]

Trump has used DOGE as part of his effort to attack and dismember wide swathes of government institutions he has no authority to cut. While the record on this is far too extensive to even begin to properly cover here (I expect it will be a recurring subject as these articles proceed), Trump's efforts to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are sort of a microcosm.

Created by congress in the wake of Big Finance crashing the economy in 2008, the CFPB is, simply stated, the anti-scam police, the federal agency charged with monitoring mega-sized financial institutions, enforcing consumer protection law, cracking down on fraudulent and abusive practices by finance. And, for Trump (and many in his party), that's the problem; the CFPB is a rare part of government that operates against the oligarchs and on behalf of the public. In a regime prioritizing what Public Citizen calls "'get out of jail free' cards" to corporate criminals, the CFPB was an obvious target.[9] Since opening for business in July 2011, the CFPB has returned to consumers over $20 billion extracted from them by inappropriate business practices by these institutions, at a cost of a fraction of that--a bargain, by any measure.

But under the Trumptatorship, black is white, up is down and we get Trump telling reporters at the White House that he aims to eliminate the agency that combats waste, fraud and abuse "because we're trying to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse."[10] Eric Petry and Ian Vandewalker of the Brennan Center For Justice get much closer to the actual "why" in noting

"Donors from the broader financial services industry, including hedge funds and investment banks, spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Trump's presidential bid, and some have now taken on prominent administration positions."

One of those donors is Elon Musk, who owns multiple enterprises regulated by the CFPB. That, alone, makes any involvement by Musk corrupt and inappropriate but, of course, it's even worse, because isn't it always?[11] Petry/Vandewalker note that there have been hundreds of complaints lodged with the CFPB against one of Musk's businesses.[12]

Trump has no constitutional authority to terminate a federal agency created by law--in this case, created by congress as a delegation of its constitutionally-assigned power to regulate commerce (Article I, section 8)--but he was illegally and unconstitutionally proceeding to do so anyway. Trump fired CFPB director Rohit Chopra. By law, the deputy director of CFPB takes over the agency in the director's absence but Trump then appointed, as acting director, Russell Vought, his chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Trump claimed as his authority in this, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, but that law allows for that kind of temporary replacement only if the official being replaced "dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office." Being fired by a dictator isn't on the list.

The illegally-appointed Vought then ordered the CFPB to halt all work on the duties assigned to the agency by congress, told its employees not to come in to the office, closed its headquarters in Washington D.C., took down its signage and informed the General Services Administration that the lease on the building will be terminated. Trump sent in DOGE, which deleted the CFPB's account on X, removed its homepage from the internet and began nosing around in its computer records. The CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve; Vought informed the Fed that the CFPB wouldn't be taking any more money--defunding it. The agency's newer employees, subject to a 2-year probationary period, were all fired, 70 of them. By email.  Vought canceled over $100 million in CFPB contracts, many of them critical to the CFPB's functioning. Through the looking-glass, this is how officials were trying to spin this:

"'Acting Director Vought is wasting no time getting to the bottom of the waste, fraud, and lavish spending at this rogue and weaponized agency and in bringing it to heel,' an OMB spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg Law. 'We are in the process of canceling hundreds of wasteful and unnecessary contracts worth over $100 million.'"

Vought then sought from the OMB--which he also runs--an exemption from a 90-day notice period required when a full-blown reduction in force is about to happen. On the chopping-block in this: over 1,000 CFPB employees--basically, the entire agency. Unsurprisingly, Vought granted himself his own request.

The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents, among others, CFPB employees, filed suit against the regime for all of this. Some of the regime's efforts to defend against the suit--by essentially blowing smoke up the judge's ass while continuing to attempt to dismantle the agency--were so outlandishly dishonest that they drew an extraordinary rebuke from DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who wrote that they were "highly misleading, if not intentionally false," and "so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything." Jackson imposed a preliminary injunction against the regime's activities, documenting all of this in her order.

This same story has repeated itself dozens of times across a wide range of government agencies.[13] In an example that has gotten more attention than most, Trump has announced his intention to eliminate the Department of Education and signed another of his Orwellian executive orders to that end. Unusually, he's been qualifying this, sometimes saying he would need the approval of congress to accomplish it, but eliminating any government agency created by congress is something that, constitutionally, only congress can do. Trump has a congress controlled by his own party, but even with that, most of this--like most of the rest of what Trump has tried to do--would never get through the regular legislative process.[14] Trump's "solution": I am the law.

When not trying to outright eliminate them, Trump has also attacked agencies that congress established to have some degree of independence, trying to bring them under his own control. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an example. The FTC is charged with, among other things, enforcing anti-trust law. It was established in 1914 and is composed of 5 commissioners who are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate and serve 7-year terms, with no more than 3 commissioners at a time to come from one party. By law, a commissioner can only be fired before his term has expired due to "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office," but in March, Trump fired both current Democratic commissioners because, they were told, their service was "inconsistent with [the] administration’s priorities." Ninety years ago, Franklin Roosevelt tried to fire an FTC commissioner on those same grounds; the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, unanimously shot down the firing. The commissioners fired by Trump are suing. NPR offers a list of members of various independent agencies like the FTC that Trump has no authority to fire but has purported to fire anyway. Several have challenged their firings and have been reinstated but legal action proceeds.

Standing against this sort of thing certainly shouldn't be read as any sort of general defense of government institutions.; This writer doesn't have one of those in him. Our federal government--and, in fact, this can be said of all our layers of government--does many things that are stupid, inappropriate, wasteful, despicable, profoundly immoral. All of us can rattle off plenty of things the government does that we dislike. Some of us hate that it even exists. And our system for interacting with it is profoundly corrupt and dysfunctional too. We need something better--much, much better. But allowing Trump to destroy the liberal democracy, even the profoundly flawed version of liberal democracy with which we've long been saddled, is no pathway to anything better, and the dictator-led super-state with which he's trying to replace it is the worst of all species of government. Once all the checks and balances are gone, they're gone for good.

Trump has asserted the power to directly nullify provisions the constitution itself--a public official whose only powers, indeed, his office itself, come solely from that enabling instrument claiming he can, in effect, change that instrument on a whim, without ever bothering with the laborious process it establishes for enacting changes. On the first day of his new regime, Trump issued an executive order directing his administration to ignore and regard as invalid the birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment, which established that anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.

A brief history lesson: The U.S. inherited birthright citizenship from English common law. When it came to white guys, that was always the status quo, but in 1857, the Supreme Court issued the appalling Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which concluded that Americans of African descent

"are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States."

This is universally regarded as one of the worst decisions ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was adopted, its first provision rejecting this and providing that

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

Pretty straightforward. If there was any doubt--and there wasn't, but that didn't prevent the government from grotesquely violating this provision at at times--it was settled in 1898, when the Supreme Court ruled, in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, that a Chinese man born to Chinese parents during a period in which they lived in San Francisco was, in fact, a U.S. citizen (he had been denied entry into the U.S. on the grounds that he wasn't).

Birthright citizenship has been a settled constitutional matter for 157 years, a settled matter for the Supreme Court for 127 and our vast body of relevant laws, stretching far beyond the lifespan of anyone living today, have been built around the concept, but so many years after we consigned the Dred Scott ruling to the landfill of history, the Trumptatorship has unearthed its substantive "reasoning" to try to assign a constitutional provision to that same plot of moldering earth.

Trump's EO says,

"[T]he Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.  The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'"

That's true, and the amendment's history also makes plain what this references: diplomats from foreign nations, who have diplomatic immunity, or members of an invading army occupying U.S. territory.[15] The Wong Kim Ark decision tracks these exceptions back deeply into the English law, noting that this wording excludes "the two classes of cases--children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state..." But Trump's EO proclaims that, "among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States" to undocumented immigrants, and he orders that "no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship" of those born to undocumented immigrants.

One can point out that this is a "reading" that is entirely alien to the entire history of the 14th Amendment. One could even cover that history. For example, Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, gave a nice, compact recitation of it in which she noted that

"Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the legislative history of the Citizenship Clause is that both its proponents and opponents agreed that it recognizes and protects birthright citizenship for the children of aliens born on U.S. soil. The Reconstruction Congress did not debate the meaning of the Clause, but rather whether, based on their shared understanding of its meaning, the Clause embodied sound public policy..."

And one can point out that Trump's "theory" here is one that was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court (in Pyler v. Doe in 1982), and that it's yet another of those fringe crackpot notions on to which he's latched, this one from the disgraced John Eastman,[16] and that any scrutiny makes it crumble to dust as entirely as Count Orlock on a sunny beach.[17] Trump does not care.

What matters here isn't Trump's phony window-dressing rationales. What matters is what he's trying to sell with them. What matters is that Trump is charged to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," yet is not only violating the law on a daily basis as a matter of policy but nearly everything he's done has directly violated the law. That's all he's doing. That's how he's ruling: the presidency as a criminal enterprise. What matters is that Trump raised his hand and swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" yet not only trespasses against it at every turn but has straight-up said he isn't bound by it and can, in effect, rewrite it at will when it suits him.

A "president" who can do these things--is allowed to do these things--can do anything, and he and his successors will do anything, every successful outrage precedent for the next. If he's determined to do them and there's nothing to stop him, then, practically, it matters not a whit that he has no authority to do them. So far, the courts have very often held the line, but that isn't likely to last. Experience dictates that the obscenity that is our present Supreme Court, the court of final appeal, will only continue the project it has had underway for years now, its majority hollowing out the constitution and acting as a steadfast, even enthusiastic patron of authoritarianism--a tag-team partner for the Trumptatorship. The congress, dominated by those committed--or at least supinely acquiescent--to the Maximal Leader have responded to the lower courts' defense of the law and the constitution by threatening to gut those courts' power. It's a very bad situation, a major crisis that has highlighted the extent to which so much of our government rests on a sort of gentleman's agreement and exposed what happens when that agreement is abandoned. Every president has, at times, violated the law, contravened the constitution and had to be put back in his place for it--that's the nature of this sort of power, and we've often done a very poor job of smacking it down--but the U.S. has never experienced anything like this, a dictator operating entirely outside the strictures of the constitutional system and, recognizing no limits that former system placed on his office, writing his own rules and using the power he gives himself to leave it in ruins. Unless this is stopped, the U.S. is never again going to see anything but this.

Americans, if you don't want that--and even if any of you think you do want it, you don't, I promise--you have to do something about it.

--j.

---

 [1] That style is typical of the Trump gang's pronouncements when making so many of its outlandish claims--sounds confident, assertive, obvious but is, substantively, pure fringe-crackpot rubbish that isn't backed up by history, fact or law.

 [2] The case was Train v. City of New York. Two decades later, the court took up Clinton v. City of New York (1996), a case that challenged a legislative line-item veto, which allowed the president to unilaterally rescind spending provisions already passed into law. This was basically the same power Trump is claiming but had more legitimacy, as it was at least passed by congress and signed into law by the president, but the court struck it down as unconstitutional too.

 [3] I'd originally planned to go into the history of this matter in more detail but it's already been done for me. Trump's recent claim of a "constitutional power" to impound and the Bizarro "history" he references to support it come from legal memos prepared by Mark Paoletta, his Office of Management and Budget general counsel, and some colleagues. Last year, Zachary Price, a professor at UC Law San Francisco eviscerated it. In February, an NRP "Planet Money" article kicked it around again.

 [4] Also undermining the entire point of the law, which was to provide a simple, straightforward and convenient means of registering to vote.

 [5] The EAC was established nearly a quarter-century ago by the Help America Vote Act. It was established as an independent, bipartisan org. There are four commissioners, chosen by the President and the Democratic and Republican leaders in congress, no more than two commissioners can be of the same party and the vote of at least 3 are required for the commission to act.

 [6] PFLAG and others filed suit against this executive order. They successfully argued for a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the EO by the Trump regime, then a preliminary injunction.

[7] Trump fired 17 IGs late on the first Friday night of his present regime--a move intended to minimize press coverage--and continued firing them in the weeks after. A president can legally fire IGs but the Inspector General Act of 1978 requires 30 days notice to congress prior to any firing and in 2022, in response to Trump's first-term antics with firing IGs who got in his way, the law was changed to require, in the words of American Oversight, that the notice to congress "also include a substantive explanation and case-specific reasons for the removal or transfer of an inspector general."

 [8] Trump, of course, lies as easily as he breathes, and he and his underlings have accumulated an extraordinary rap-sheet of false claims regarding DOGE's work. In one infamous example, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt--in her very first news briefing--claimed that

"DOGE and OMB [the Office of Management and Budget]... found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money."

Actually, that was a preposterous lie, and the next day, Trump escalated it, claiming his regime "identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas" [emphasis mine]. Trump was present when Musk admitted to reporters this wasn't accurate, but he then not only repeated it but  opted to double the dollar-figure, insisting that $100 million in condoms had been intended for Hamas. A month later, he was still repeating this. For the record, the actual amount of dollars designated to condoms for Gaza or Hamas was $0.

 [9] Trump is all about the oligarchs. In March, Public Citizen released a report detailing how Trump "is moving rapidly to halt and hinder federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate lawbreaking."

[10] Everything else Trump said about the CFPB in those comments was ludicrously false. Recalling his 2017 insistence that there were "very good people" taking part in a Nazi rally in Virginia, Trump said the CFPB

"was set up to destroy people. [Elizabeth Warren] used that as her little personal agency to go around and destroy people... That was set up to destroy some very good people, and, uh, and it worked--a lot of great people... If you looked at when she really ran it, wow, that was a vicious group of people. They really destroyed a lot of people."

Elizabeth Warren originated the idea of the CFPB when she was a professor at Harvard Law but she never ran it in the way Trump described, because she never ran it at all. Warren helped establish the CFPB as a special advisor to then-President Obama. Obama briefly considered appointing her to run it but chose former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as its first director instead. Speaking of the CFPB in the past tense, Trump said, of eliminating it, "We did the right thing. It was a very important thing to get rid of." The whole incident was reminiscent of the sort of rambling Joe Biden has done since 2019, where it sounds like he's talking about some movie, only marginally related to anything in the real world, that is playing out only in his head and trying to make policy based on it.

[11] Trump and DOGE have already attacked multiple government agencies and regulators investigating Musk's companies or taking or considering regulatory actions against them.

[12] Petry/Vandewalker point out that investigations of those complaints "will not proceed under the administration's order to stop all supervisory activities." The CFPB maintains all kinds of sensitive information on businesses, consumers, their own employees, files Musk's DOGE can peruse at their liesure. Hanna Hickman, a bureau attorney, tells CBS News that

"[Musk is] potentially able to gain access to files of his competitors like Venmo and Cash App. He is able to take out the regulator that would've been the watchdog for his company."

[13] Among other things, the regime has carried out illegal mass-firings, aimed at crippling the ability of disapproved government agencies to function. To try to square this, legally, the Trump gang has claimed these employees are being given their walking-papers because of poor job performance, which, among other things, puts a black mark on the victims' employment records and prevents them from accessing unemployment, and, of course, it was a total lie, one that, once these actions resulted in numerous lawsuits, the regime then presented to courts, in the face of the entire documentary record.

[14] House Republicans are pushing a bill that would allow Trump to ignore the regular legislative process and would not only retroactively endorse his destruction of federal agencies but give him carte blanche to continue it, letting him submit a plan for "restructuring" government agencies and only requiring his proposals get a simple majority vote from congress. This is unlikely to go anywhere but it's another disturbing example of Republicans giving in to, instead of standing up against, a dictator. As I've said repeatedly, it's much worse if the rest of the state backs the dictator's play; at that point, all is lost.

[15] At the time, it also included American Indians, who were not U.S. citizens--a state of affairs that ended when citizenship was legally extended to Native Americans

[16] Eastman's highlights include this, his "argument" that Kamala Harris wasn't an American citizen because of it and wasn't eligible to be president and his notion that, after the 2020 election, Trump's then-Vice President Mike Pence could, in his ceremonial role overseeing certification of the electoral college results, just unilaterally throw out the electoral votes from multiple states. Eastman's license to practice law in his own state has been suspended and his state bar is undertaking disbarment proceedings against him.

[17] Three lawsuits challenging Trump's EO on birthright citizenship have already resulted in 3 court orders barring the Trump gang from proceeding with this while litigation is pending. The regime appealed all 3, and all 3 appeals courts upheld the orders. The administration is now trying to get the Supreme Court to throw them out but, as there's no disagreement among any of the courts involved, intervention would be extraordinary.

Trumptatorship 2: Of Enemies, Alien & Domestic

This is the 2nd in a series of articles covering Donald Trump's efforts to end liberal democracy in the United States and replace it with authoritarian autocracy--a Trumptatorship. The 1st part, an introduction, is here.

As part of his fanatical crusade against immigrants, Trump has just invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which grants a president extraordinary powers to apprehend, detain, expel subjects of a foreign government with which the U.S. is at war. That last is a requirement--by law, the powers Trump is claiming require that either congress has declared war against a foreign government or that foreign government has invaded or otherwise attacked the U.S.. Neither of those things have happened; Trump's invocation of the law was aimed at--not making this up--a Venezuelan prison-gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA). It has no more legal validity than would a Trump declaration that he's now the hereditary monarch, but Trump has invoked the law, claimed those powers, asserted a version of them more extreme than has ever existed and then used them to rendition over 130 people, whom his regime arbitrarily accused of being foreigners and members of the gang, to a gulag in El Savador without any semblance of due process, without even so much as a hearing, in violation of both the law and an explicit court order not to rendition until the legal matters surrounding the Act had been addressed. The attacks on the court subsequently levied by Trump and his ghouls are specifically aimed at undermining the constitutional order itself, a full-bore effort to convert public support for that order into disdain for it.

As this writer documented at some length, Trump, in the 2024 cycle, went full Nazi on immigrants, directly appropriating the rhetoric of the Third Reich in describing them as disease-carriers, as "animals," as "savages," as "garbage," as "predators" who "rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill." And, infamously, eat your pets. He vowed he would "liberate... our entire nation from this mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers, and thugs." Trump made this one of his top campaign "issues." As I wrote at the time,

"One can point out that none of this is true, that all available data indicates that immigrants commit crimes at notably lower rates than the native-born, that even if one accepts "migrant crime" as a real presidential issue--and it isn't one--it's a microscopic one, that Trump's "sources," on the rare occasions when he even has any, don't at all support his assertions, but fact-checking such talk completely misses the point, which is to demonize and dehumanize brown untermenschen as a means of politically organizing Aryan voters around hating them... It's the fascism, stupid."

In mixed company, Trump would--in a game also often indulged by his apologists--sometimes take a step back and pretend to be opposed only to illegal immigrants, which wouldn't make any of his ugly rhetoric any better or defensible even if it was true, but, of course, it wasn't, and he was constantly betraying himself on the point. He embraced Nazi pseudoscience, saying immigrants commit murder because they're genetically predisposed to do so: "it's in their genes." He, in fact, repeatedly said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our nation," directly contextualizing his virulent anti-immigrant campaign as racist blood-and-soil Nazism.

Trump's rhetoric was one of war; he vowed a fanatical crusade of, essentially, ethnic cleansing against the foreign-born blood-poisoners.

That's what's been playing out this year. The U.S. Constitution requires that those targeted by the government be given due process, and the government has established a large body of laws and system of adjudication for providing it but in an entirely cynical bid to create a pretext for getting around this, for activating, instead, extraordinary war powers, Trump arbitrarily designated several criminal gangs--Tren de Aragua was one of them--as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). But entirely lacking any political program--the central component of terrorism--they aren't. These gangs carry on regular criminal activity--peddling drugs, prostitution, theft, protection rackets, etc. Their violence is that of capitalists looking to make more and more money but operating outside the law. Moreover, the notion that TdA is a major threat within the U.S. is completely unsupportable, a politically-motivated phantom. The Department of Homeland Security recently estimated TdA's presence in the United States at only about 600 people. Admittedly, that comes with lots of caveats. The number is based on reassessments of Venezuelans who are known to have come to the U.S. and the U.S. and Venezuela don't share law-enforcement intel. At the same time, the 600 are people who may (or may not) have connections to TdA, not 600 members of TdA. A December Americas Quarterly article by a pair of academics, Charles Larratt-Smith and John Polga-Hecimovich, surveys the evidence and makes the case that claims about the danger allegedly posed by TdA are absurdly overblown, noting, among other things, that

"[N]early no claims made by U.S. law enforcement about crimes committed by purported members of TdA have been substantiated by hard evidence that directly connects the accused with the organization in Venezuela. In fact, none of the national, state, and local law enforcement agencies contacted in the U.S by InSight Crime in April 2024 reported any significant presence of TdA in their jurisdictions."

Despite a major diaspora of those fleeing economic collapse, political repression and growing violence in Venezuela--a truly horrific situation that has Venezuelans fleeing to their regional neighbors in droves--USA Today reports that "in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement told USA TODAY that agents had arrested fewer than 30 people with TdA connections."

On 15 March, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act against TdA, and later that same day, he ordered 261 people to be renditioned to El Salvador, where the "president," Nayib Bukele, has been busily making himself a president-for-life, those so shipped to be stored in CECOT, a prison notorious for human rights abuses and from which no one ever leaves alive. Of those, the Trump regime said 137 were TdA and removed under the "authority" of the Alien Enemies Act, 101 were removed as a result of regular immigration proceedings and 23 were said to be members of the MS-13 gang (also falsely designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the regime). As noted earlier, the renditions happened in direct violation of a court order.

When rolling out the regime's talking-points on all of this, Trump's ghouls cranked up the gaslight, trying to sell war and the image of the Maximal Leaders standing tall and protecting his people from the foreign sub-human, but what Trump had actually done kept getting in the way.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that those who were renditioned--to slavery under an authoritarian regime (a move that raises a raft of other legal problems)--had been "foreign terrorist aliens." That's 3 separate claims in one phrase, and the Trump regime, which carried out all of this without so much as a trace of the due process required of it by the constitution, has neither proven nor even provided any evidence for any of them. The regime, which has insisted on keeping secret nearly every detail of this, provided no evidence that any of those renditioned were or had ever been part of the TdA or MS-13 gangs either. But calling them "terrorists," via that inaccurate designation from earlier, does play a lot better on the news than "the American dictator has declared people to be foreigners, members of Tren de Aragua and terrorists and renditioned them to a foreign tyranny without providing any evidence for any of that," doesn't it?

Asked about due process and how the regime was sure that those who were deported actually were who the regime claims they were, Leavitt said,

"I can assure the American people that Customs and Border Patrol and ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are sure about the identities of the individuals who were on these planes and the threat that they posed to our homeland. They take this incredibly seriously. They are putting their lives on the line to deport these designated terrorists from our country and they should be trusted to do that, and that's exactly what the American people elected this president to do... They should be trusted and respected by the American public with this operation."

The wisdom of history is that governments are never to be trusted in such matters but that's the word from the designated mouth of the most dishonest president in the history of the republic: Trust us."

Meanwhile, a growing body of credible information developed by the press when working the story directly contradicts such "assurances." From NBC News:

"The families strongly deny that their relatives are connected to the Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua, a claim the Trump administration has used to justify their quick deportations under a rarely used law from 1798, the Alien Enemies Act. They say their family members have been falsely accused and targeted because of their tattoos."

Among other things, the NBC report covers a man who was legally present in the U.S., had applied for asylum and was actively going through the asylum process--kidnapped by the Trump regime and shipped off to a foreign gulag, apparently because of, in a story that has appeared again and again throughout this sordid affair, innocuous body-art.

The Miami Herald:

"Families of three men who appear to have been deported and imprisoned in El Salvador told the Miami Herald that their relatives have no gang affiliation--and two said their relatives had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. One has been previously accused by the U.S. government of ties to the Tren de Aragua gang, but his family denies any connection."

The New York Times:

"A growing chorus of families, elected officials and immigration lawyers have begun coming forward in the news media to reject or cast doubt on the allegations. Some lawyers--sent into frantic searches for their clients in detention centers across the country--believe their clients have been singled out simply for their tattoos... Lindsay Toczylowski, a lawyer with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her client was a young professional in his 30s who worked in the arts industry and had been in detention since he sought entry into the United States last year, when he applied for asylum using an online government app, CBP One. She said her client had come under suspicion because of his tattoos, but his lawyers had not been given the opportunity to counter the claims through a court hearing."

WLRN Radio:

"The administration has not released the names of the deportees. But at least one migrant who appears to be among them also appears not to be a gang member, let alone an alien enemy terrorist--and appears to have been branded as such for nothing more than a tattoo."

The Miami Herald:

"Frengel Reyes Mota was supposed to be dealing with his ongoing asylum case as he fought for his chance to stay in the United States. Suddenly, he instead found himself locked up in a mega prison thousands of miles away... But the 24-year-old father does not have a criminal record in Venezuela. His U.S. immigration detention records are riddled with mistakes, raising questions about how reliable they are. He does not have tattoos and his family members deny he has any gang ties."

Mother Jones:

"Mother Jones has spoken with friends, family members, and lawyers of ten men sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration based on allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua. All of them say their relatives have tattoos and believe that is why their loved ones were targeted. But they vigorously reject the idea that their sons, brothers, and husbands have anything to do with Tren de Aragua... The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including--in many cases--by providing official documents attesting to their relatives' lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process."

More generally, Colorado Public Radio reports:

"A CPR News review of court records, social media posts and immigration court proceedings finds that the evidence behind claims of gang membership is frequently little more than circumstantial, if that. Tattoos of roses and clocks. A nod at a telephone when a confidential informant asks about gang membership. Attendance at a party where an ICE claim about the presence of one member of Tren de Aragua is then extended to everyone in the room as an associate."

And so on. Leavitt repeatedly referred to those who were renditioned as "terrorists," called them "heinous monsters," said treating them this way was "saving countless American lives," but the regime was forced to concede in a court filing that "many" of those accused of being TdA "do not have criminal records in the United States" but, in an Orwellian twist, argued that "the lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat," and that, "In fact, based upon their association with TdA," an "association" for which the regime had offered no evidence whatsoever and that was one of the matters at issue,

"the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile."

Yowza. On 31 March, USA Today reported that

"Of the 50 people [so far] identified who have been deported to a prison in El Salvador, 44 have no criminal record in either the U.S. or Venezuela, according to Kate Wheatcroft, an immigrant rights activist with the New York-based nonprofit Together & Free."

Five who, before being renditioned, had sued over all of this, have no criminal record in either country and for several who had applied for asylum and were going through that process, "their asylum claims were based in part on having been targeted by TdA itself." The Miami Herald reported that one of the renditioned had already gone through the process and had been granted asylum in the U.S.! He--already a legally-protected asylee--was targeted and renditioned by the Trump gang because he had tattoos.[1]

The "source" for the claim that TdA uses identifying tattoos appears to be the corrupt, virulently anti-immigrant Greg Abbott regime in Texas. CNN reports that

"The Texas Department of Public Safety last year identified an assortment of tattoos connected to Tren de Aragua, many relatively common: stars on the shoulder, royal crowns, firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars. A photo collage of the tattoos even includes a Nike 'Jumpman' logo and Michael Jordan's number 23 jersey number as an identifier of gang membership."

Meanwhile, in the real world, Larratt-Smith and Polga-Hecimovich note that "the tattoos or dress codes ascribed to TdA members in the U.S. has little backing in other places where the gang has been known to operate." The Herald story notes that "experts have said that, unlike many other criminal gangs, TdA members don’t have specific, identifiable tattoos."

Perhaps most emblematic of the complete indifference of the Trump regime to who they were renditioning, eight of those shipped out were women. The Bukele regime refused to put them in a gulag designed for men--the foreign despot behaving, in this matter, more decently than the American one--and they were returned to the U.S. One of the women has since filed an affidavit in which she said, as Newsweek reported,

"Shortly after takeoff, she overheard two U.S. officials talking: 'There is an order saying we can't take off but we already have.'"

...establishing, if true, that officials were aware of the court order.[2] She also "says she witnessed federal agents urging men to confess gang membership under threat," trying to get them to sign papers saying they were Tren de Aragua.

In response to the court order barring the regime from carrying out the renditions, Leavitt offered what became the regime's standard response, attacking the constitutional order itself. She asserted that the court's actions "had no legal basis" and denied that "a single judge in a single city"--that is, the representative of a co-equal branch of government operating as it was legally constituted--can issue such orders.

"Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear, federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President's conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion."

...except, of course, this wasn't a matter of "foreign affairs," Trump has no "authorities under the Alien Enemies Act" and there is no "invasion," much less any "declared" one. The notion that Trump has these same powers--granted by congress in the Act only in the extreme circumstance of wartime--as part of his "core Article II powers" is a fallback "argument," one that essentially acknowledges that the invocation of the Act is, despite all the heat used to pitch it, frivolous and will only withstand scrutiny if the courts choose to completely ignore the law and its history. At the same time, the existence of the law renders ludicrous the "core Article II" assertion; if a president already had these extraordinary powers, there would be no need to either grant them to him or, as in the Act, limit their activation only to wartime; congress wouldn't even have the power to do the latter; that congress gave itself the power to activate the Act by declaring war means the powers the Act grants don't exist in the absence of the scheme established by the Act for activating them (and, in fact, all previous uses of the law--there have only been three in the entire scope of U.S. history--occurred during wars declared by congress). This secondary "argument" that Trump has these power as an inherent part of the presidency is, for obvious reasons, a particularly insidious one and, contradicting the first, it's being advanced with an eye toward giving the right-wing Supreme Court a pick-and-choose variety-menu of rationalizations for granting Trump these powers, something the regime hopes will happen.

White nationalist, demagogue and Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says that's what they hope will happen. Apparently lost in a particularly thick haze, Miller called the judge's order, not his own boss's actions, an assault on democracy itself. Interviewed by Kasie Hunt on CNN, Miller asserted,

"The President of the United States and his administration reserve all rights under the constitution to conduct national security operations in defense of the United States. The Alien Enemies Act, which was passed into law by the founding generation of this country, men like John Adams, was written explicitly to give the president the authority to repel an alien invasion of the United States. That is not something that a district court judge has any authority whatsoever to interfere with, to enjoin, to restrict or to restrain in any way. You can read the law yourself. There's no one clause in that law that makes it subject to judicial review, let alone district court review."[emphases his]

Nor, of course, does there need to be; judicial interpretation has been a fundamental feature of the American system since its founding era--the same era that produced the Alien Enemies Act. Miller insisted Trump was exercising "his core Article II powers as commander-in-chief," but the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces; while Miller's comments are no doubt pleasing to those elements of Trump's base whose extremities stiffen at the thought of military force wielded in a holy mission against brown undermen, Trump's position in the military hierarchy is only relevant in a law-enforcement matter like this in that it's an example of the dictatorial "this is war" imagery Trump and his underlings are invoking. Miller insisted that "the president and the president alone makes the decision of what triggers" the Act--a claim belied by the plain text of the Act itself--and that his decision isn't subject to judicial review at all. Further, he rhetorically asked, "does a district-court judge have the right to direct or enjoin troop movements overseas?" A direct equation of Trump's control over domestic affairs in the U.S. to his control over the military. And, from a legal perspective, rancid rubbish. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law points out that there was robust judicial review of presidential decisions made under the Act in all of the previous invocations of it--in the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.[3]

Miller also repeated the loony conspiracy theory outlined by Trump in his proclamation that Tren de Aragua--a gang made up of criminals imprisoned by the Venezuelan government--operated at the command of the Venezuelan government and that this justified Trump's invocation of the Act. "It is documented [in Trump's proclamation] that the TdA was sent by the Venezuelan government."

In reality, the U.S. intelligence community has, as the New York Times reports,

"concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela's government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders... Mr. Trump’s key factual assertions contradicted the earlier intelligence assessment, the officials [with which the Times spoke] said. It concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Maduro administration and that the two are instead hostile to each other, citing incidents in which Venezuelan security forces exchanged gunfire with gang members... The assessment, according to one official, also portrayed the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized--with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control--to be able to carry out any government orders... The assessment, this official also said, asserts that when the State Department designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization last month at Mr. Trump’s direction, a minister in the Maduro administration publicly praised the action."

The Times story also notes that

Mr. Trump's proclamation cited scant evidence for his core finding that Tren de Aragua as an organization has been committing crimes to destabilize the United States 'at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.'

"Its most concrete detail was that the gang had expanded from 2012 to 2017, when Tareck El Aissami served as governor of the region of Aragua, and in 2017 Mr. Maduro appointed him as vice president. But the proclamation omitted that Mr. Aissami is no longer part of the Maduro administration, which is prosecuting him on corruption charges."

Another detail that may just be relevant here is the fact that the Maduro regime raided the prison TdA had taken over and turned into its headquarters for most of the gang's existence and razed it to the ground. Nearly 2 years ago.

Meanwhile, Trump's corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi[4] attacked the judge who issued the order,

"saying that he 'supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans.' She added that the DOJ would be 'undeterred' in its work with the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to 'stop this invasion.'"

Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan offered perhaps the most succinct summation of the administration's attitude, telling Fox viewers,

"I'm proud to be part of this administration. We're not stoppin'. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're comin'."

Trump was his usual reserved self:

No corruption scandals have ever touched James Boasberg, the judge in question, who was such a controversial, radical rabble-rouser that he'd gotten his first judicial appointment from a Republican (George Bush Jr.), his next (to his present post) by a Democrat (Obama)[5] and, even in this polarized political environment, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 96-0. While stonewalling Boasberg and flatly refusing to cooperate with the court, Trump has denounced those who have vandalized Tesla properties--a company owned by Elon Musk, Trump's head of the "Department of Government Efficiency"--as "sick terrorist thugs," Bondi condemned what she called a "wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties," and Trump suggested his regime would send the vandals (the "terrorists") to the same El Salvadoran prison. A small glimpse of where we're heading.

Trump's call for impeachment drew a rebuke from right-wing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who issued a statement:

"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

But MAGA-aligned congressclown Brandon Gill (R-TX) immediately introduced a resolution to impeach Boasberg. It laughably misstates both the facts and the law (Gill isn't a lawyer and isn't very bright either) and provides no grounds for any impeachment for its asserted high crimes and misdemeanors and instead of just being laughed out of the room, it immediately drew 22 co-sponsors. This is becoming a regular spectacle in congress: as the courts have widely resisted Trump's illegal actions, Republican congressclowns have tried to advance impeachment against multiple judges. House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized these courts' efforts to uphold the law, as they were constituted to do, as "abuses," introduced legislation to bar district courts from issuing such injunctions,and threatened to weaponize congress' power in the face of court actions he dislikes:

"we can eliminate an entire district court. We have power over funding, over the courts and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act."

Trump won the election with over 50% of  voters casting their ballot against him--even if there even was such a thing as a mandate for the reactionary dictatorship he's trying to impose, this definitely ain't it--but as his numbers sink even further, Johnson fumed, "it violates separation of powers when a judge thinks that they can enjoin something that a president is doing, that the American people voted for"--a novel principle for Johnson who, like the other congressional Republicans, certainly never offered it when courts enjoined Joe Biden's actions. Trump and the rest of MAGA, in fact, praised and raved about the same kind of court-orders they now denounce as "tyrannical" when said orders were issued against the Biden administration.[6] Johnson's appeal to democracy is particularly rich--he, himself, worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election when the candidate he favored lost. That would be the candidate, now president, Johnson is backing here--the one who, himself, tried to overthrow that election and is also crowing out of his other beak about his allegedly great democratic mandate.

Documenting that kind of hypocrisy is easy but while it unquestionably illustrates the character of the players here and provides context, it's also trite, this writer finds it tiresome and it risks trivializing a matter that, just now, is of the absolute utmost importance. One can take the time to go through every part of this, as I have here, show how Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is baseless, how he's falsely said he can activate it at will and that it gives him legal superpowers it has never given any president and all the rest but the truth--one at which all this effort is getting--is that Trump doesn't care about the law. He doesn't care about the constitution. He's just a dictator doing dictatorial things and his citation of law is strictly frivolous--utilitarian window-dressing. If he thought he could mangle the annual presidential Thanksgiving Day proclamation into a legalistic pretext for and useful propaganda to sell what he wants to do here, he'd be using it. Just as before, it's the fascism, stupid.

This is gangster government, Americans. Do you really want to live under a state where what I've described here can happen? Where a president can just concoct a stream of lies then use them to assert tyrannical powers he doesn't have, ignore the law, ignore the constitution, violate both at will, declare people to be non-citizens at will, arbitrarily label them as criminals or terrorists or heinous monsters, kidnap them and rendition them to permanent slavery under a foreign despotism without having to prove or even provide any evidence of any of that, then insists that it's all beyond the scope of any legitimate review of any kind by the other duly-constituted formerly co-equal branches of government? A dictatorship where those other branches may even essentially commit suicide by agreeing to go along with and facilitate the dictator's murder of the constitutional order? Whatever you may think America's problems are, the most powerful nation in the history of the world being converted into this kind of dictatorship is a much bigger problem, a much bigger threat to you, me and to the entire world. This is not the way to anything better. But if things are allowed to be this way, they will become this way. That's the nature of this particular species of "government," each outrage against liberty becoming a precedent for further encroachment. Now, Americans, I don't, for a moment, believe that's what most of you want but that's what's upon us, and if you don't want it, you need to do something, before it's too late. Sound off, speak up, speak out while you still can. Because if this continues down the path it has, the days when you'll still be able will be numbered.

--j.

---

[1] That same Herald article covered the story of a professional soccer player who

"took part in peaceful demonstrations against the Nicolas Maduro regime [in Venezuela] in 2024. He was detained, tortured with electric shock shock and suffocation. When he was released he fled to the U.S. seeking protection."

" Despite having no criminal record in Venezuela, no links to gangs and no history of violence," he, too, was kidnapped by the Trump gang and sent to El Salvador.

[2] The Trump gang have denied they violated the court order, claiming the order came too late, when the planes had already departed. The judge had ordered any planes that had taken off to return first verbally then as part of a written order. Trump's underlings have been playing a game in public of insisting the planes were already gone before the written order was issued, and Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the verbal order didn't have the same legal authority of a written one--strictly Uranian. The regime retained custody of those being renditioned

[3] Vladeck also points out that Trump's "argument" for invoking the Act, "is nonsense."

"Whatever else might be said about TdA, it is not a 'foreign nation or government,' and there is no 'foreign nation or government' that is currently undertaking an 'invasion or predatory incursion' against the United States. DOJ tries to split the difference by suggesting that TdA is acting at the direction of the 'Maduro regime,' but it never actually makes the argument that would have to follow to make the statute even arguably applicable--that the Venezuelan government is responsible for the 'invasion or predatory incursion.' The Alien Enemy Act is specific on this point, and TdA just doesn’t fit the bill."

[4] While Attorney General of Florida, Bondi faced complaints by Floridians defrauded by Trump as part of his "Trump University" scam. When running for reelection, Bondi solicited campaign contributions from Trump. He gave her a $25,000 "donation"--a bribe--then her office announced they'd be taking no legal action on those complaints. When Trump's original choice for Attorney General, an apparent sex-offender, blew up, he chose Bondi for the job.

[5] Boasberg is a federal judge, currently the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, not, as Trump told Fox, some "local judge."

[6] And to be clear, such injunctions are issued against every presidential administration. They all overstep at times--that's the nature of power. That Trump has drawn more of them than others reflects only his insistence on trying to run a gangster government and the judicial branch's resistance--so far--to this.