Despotism at the Door

The thread that ties John Bolton and Kilmar Abrego Garcia is clear: We have a president who wants to operate outside the law.

Two years ago yesterday, Donald Trump was booked on racketeering charges at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia. Those charges—which stemmed from Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2020 election in the state—have gone up in smoke after the American people saw fit to deliver him the 2024 contest for real. But one artifact from that day lives on: Trump’s mug shot, which now hangs framed outside the Oval Office. What a country, huh? Happy Monday.

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A woman shouts slogans through a megaphone in front of a National Guard vehicle as protesters gather at Columbus Circle in Washington DC. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

It’s Not Backsliding. It’s a March to Dictatorship.

by William Kristol

Well, I took a week off, but the slide toward authoritarianism didn’t. To wit:

• Military leaders and intelligence professionals were purged.

• A prominent Trump critic’s home was raided.

• The Epstein coverup proceeded apace.

• A major corporation was extorted.

• Universities and the media remained under assault.

• A national museum was ordered to rewrite our history.

• The attempt at mid-decade redistricting in order to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives moved ahead.

• Mass deportation and civic intimidation continued across the nation.

• Presidential control of law enforcement in the nation’s capital intensified, with the promise that it will expand to other places.

• And vanishingly few Republican elected officials objected to any of this.

This (partial!) list leads me to correct my first sentence. For what we are seeing is not merely a “slide toward authoritarianism.” It’s a march toward despotism. And it’s a march whose pace is accelerating.

Now, nations can and do “slide” toward authoritarianism. The term “democratic backsliding” was invented to describe the difficulty new democracies have in sustaining their institutions under the pressure of a previously undemocratic history, of resisting their past authoritarian habits, of overcoming their lack of understanding or commitment to the new order.

But that’s not what we are primarily seeing here. We’re not seeing backsliding. In only seven months, we’ve seen a remarkably sustained if somewhat chaotic series of abuses and usurpations in pursuit of the object of despotism.

It’s a purposeful project, not an inadvertent one. All societies obviously have authoritarian elements. Every democracy is susceptible to the claim of a demagogue who insists, “I alone can fix it.” Every polity is susceptible to bigotry. Every public is susceptible to the lure of false promises and the fear of invented threats. It may even be that the arc of political life naturally bends towards authoritarianism.

Dealing with endemic authoritarian tendencies has always been part of the work of preserving democracy. Our failure in curbing and managing such tendencies has certainly made our society more vulnerable to despotism.

But whatever our past failures, however many authoritarian elements embedded themselves over time in our liberal democracy, the challenge we face today is closer to straight-up despotism. And the project of imposing that dictatorship is no longer much disguised, if at all. The enemies of a free society—the enemies of limited government and the rule of law, the opponents of political liberty and human equality—don’t sugarcoat what they’re doing. There’s surely no reason we should sugarcoat what we’re seeing.

And as we see the actions of Trump and his apparatchiks, does anyone think they’re going to all this trouble to accumulate power so they can willingly hand it over in 2028? Does anyone think that if the public tries to vote against them, that they will go gently into the political night? Does anyone think that, should Trump try to undermine the choice of the people in 2028, he would meet the same resistance from within the government that he met in 2020? Would Attorney General Bondi or Secretary of Defense Hegseth or Secretary of Homeland Security Noem or FBI Director Patel rebuff presidential directives and act to ensure the peaceful transfer of power?

No. They would be eager lieutenants in the subversion of our free government.

There would be resistance in the ranks. But the ranks won’t be populated with the kinds of people who were there in 2020. And there would be resistance from some states and regions. But a kind of low-grade civil war is hardly a desirable outcome. Nor is it one that will necessarily result in victory for freedom.

I’m sorry to return from my week at the beach without tidings of joy. But we ought to see things as they are and to call them as we see them. And we ought to do so in the spirit of Lincoln: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

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Justice for Kilmar

by Andrew Egger

Under Trump 2.0, two types of people have been singled out for suffering.

First, there are the nameless and faceless, the voiceless and vulnerable. Foreign children starving or dying of AIDS; illegal immigrants (not to mention the occasional Hispanic citizen or legal resident) sucked up into the Kafkaesque nightmare of ICE confinement; poor and rural Medicaid recipients—all have been treated with remarkable cruelty and contempt.

Then there are those Trump considers his personal enemies. In just seven months, the president has blazed new trails in naked retribution against a host of political opponents—most recently, John Bolton, whose Maryland home was raided by the FBI on Friday.

Among these, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a special case.

At the outset, he was of the first category—part of the group of Venezuelan migrants spirited away to prison in El Salvador. The administration had no particular beef with him at the time. He was just collateral damage of Trump’s early strategy of assaulting the authority of the U.S. courts, which he saw as obstacles between him and his immigration goals.

But the injustice of that deportation—the fact that a court had quite literally forbidden that he be sent to El Salvador—turned Abrego Garcia into a symbol. Suddenly, his story was everywhere. Suddenly, he became someone with a public name and a face. And that the White House didn’t much like. Desperate to defuse the scandal, Trump and his lackeys set out to portray Abrego Garcia—against all evidence—as a high-up gang leader, a human trafficker, a human animal. He had become a personal enemy of the state.

All this has left Abrego Garcia in a uniquely vulnerable position. Like many of Trump’s personal enemies, he’s being singled out for harsh treatment. But unlike many of them, he isn’t a citizen, so he has fewer rights that the White House and its goons need to at least pretend to respect.

On Friday, Abrego Garcia walked free for the first time in months—released from prison in Tennessee and permitted to return to his Maryland home. But his reprieve was short-lived. He met this morning with ICE officials in Baltimore. And, as expected, they immediately took him back into immigration custody.

The federal government has presented Abrego Garcia with a ridiculous, brutal choice. Under the plea deal they have offered him, he would serve a jail sentence, then be deported to Costa Rica. In exchange, he would have to plead guilty to smuggling charges—the same charges Trump lackeys like Pam Bondi have preposterously used to try to accuse Abrego Garcia of “human trafficking.”¹

To try to coerce Abrego Garcia to take the deal, immigration authorities have floated a much more grisly possibility: immediate re-deportation to Uganda, a country where Abrego Garcia has never been and has no ties.

Prosecutors often (too often) use the threat of much more serious charges to try to get suspects to make guilty pleas. But at least you can argue that the general practice of plea negotiations is directionally just—the government offers leniency in exchange for sparing them the burden of having to prove charges at trial.

In this case, the burden the government is trying to spare itself is a political one. They are determined to maintain the fiction that Abrego Garcia is a hardbitten gangbanger, a danger to his community, the kind of filth we should all be grateful to see America dispatching back across the border with extreme prejudice. But at trial, Abrego Garcia would be prepared to offer the truth: that the White House has tried to twist him into all these things in a desperate attempt to contain the fallout from their own spasmodically cruel actions, and is singling him out for unjust persecution as a result.

So far, Abrego Garcia has refused to play along. He rejected the government’s plea deal, and this morning filed a new federal suit in Maryland attempting to block the White House from immediately shipping him to Uganda. It’s a daunting task—one migrant taking on the full fury of the president of the United States and his lickspittle government—and a remarkable, perhaps foolish, vote of confidence in America’s courts to protect him.

These days, there’s no shortage of places for Americans to direct their political outrage. But Trump’s many other abuses must not give him cover to vengefully oppress Abrego Garcia. Trump has already been foiled in his desire to have Abrego Garcia and his compatriots rot in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. But justice won’t truly have been served until Abrego Garcia gets his day in court.

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Join the gang in D.C. on October 8 for a night of politics among friends. VIP tickets include premium seats and an intimate pre-show Q&A featuring Tim, Sarah and JVL.

SAVE THE DATE: Tickets for our NYC show on October 11 with Sarah, Tim and JVL will be on sale soon. Watch your inbox and TheBulwark.com/events.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Chris Rufo Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Cancel Culture… The anti-woke warrior’s authoritarian roots are showing, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• Donald Trump, Gen. Kruse, and the Perils of Yes Men… There are good reasons the best leaders don’t surround themselves with sycophants, argues GEN. MARK HERTLING.

• The Persecution of Trans Americans… On The Bulwark on Sunday, BREE FRAM joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss the escalating attacks on transgender Americans—from the removal of federal health care benefits to subpoenas for hospital records and even reports of the Department of Justice searching VA files for evidence of gender transitioning.

• What’s Next for John Bolton? Three past cases involving disclosure of classified material hint at the range of possible outcomes for Trump’s former national security advisor, observes GABRIEL SCHOENFELD.

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Quick Hits

THE TICK TOCK ON EPSTEIN: When it comes to the Epstein files, Donald Trump’s strategy for getting his people off his back has been obvious for weeks: diversion. Remember, the basic source of anger against the Justice Department was simple: They were holding onto a large tranche of Epstein-related files and simply refusing to release them. And because Trump wasn’t budging, in large part because he himself was mentioned in the files, it was thus necessary to try to redirect the Epstein story onto some other focus. Enter Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s surviving co-conspirator.

Last month, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche traveled to Florida to interview Maxwell. On Friday, the Justice Department released a redacted transcript and audio recording of that interview. In the transcript, everyone behaves pretty much as you’d expect. Maxwell, who is transparently angling for a presidential pardon or commutation—and who already received a transfer to a cushier facility—praised Trump effusively: “The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said. “In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.” Meanwhile, Blanche seemed careful to steer clear of questions that might lead to unsavory revelations, as the New York Times notes:

At one point, as Ms. Maxwell defended Mr. Epstein and denied the allegations of sex trafficking, she said associates of Mr. Epstein had been unfairly vilified for their relationships with him.

“Some are in your cabinet, who you value as your co-workers,” Ms. Maxwell said. . . . Mr. Blanche immediately moved on, and the claim that other associates of Mr. Epstein work in the Trump administration was never brought up again.

The Justice Department on Friday also began releasing certain documents to the House Oversight Committee. But while DOJ is obliged to hand over all Epstein-related files after a subcommittee vote last month in which Republicans and Democrats banded together over the objection of Republican subcommittee chair Rep. Clay Higgins, Oversight Democrats were quick to note that most of what was turned over so far is already in the public domain.

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THE DEATH TOLL RISES: Another day, another set of journalists killed by an Israeli bomb in Gaza. Reuters reports this morning that Israel’s latest attack on Nasser Hospital today killed at least 15 people, including a cameraman for Reuters itself. That cameraman, Hussam al-Masri, had been recording live video from the hospital, but that feed “suddenly shut down at the moment of the initial strike,” Reuters said.

International condemnation for Israel’s conduct in Gaza has grown to an unprecedented level as civilian conditions grow steadily worse and as Israel appears no closer to its ultimate goal of eradicating the terror group Hamas in the region. A report last week from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee—a crucial international body that examines civilian hunger conditions during conflicts—last week assessed for the first time that huge swaths of the Gaza populace are trapped in famine, with acute malnutrition rampant and starvation-related deaths on the rise.

“Constant cycles of increased humanitarian access followed by severe restrictions, together with stark disparities among vulnerable populations, have left many at heightened risk of a rapid collapse in health and nutrition status,” the report reads. “The international community can no longer afford to be diverted by short-term, marginal improvements; the scale of the crisis demands a sustained, large-scale response.”

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WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS TURBULENT CHRIS?: We’re sorry to report that the neural pathways in Donald Trump’s mind connecting the concepts “somebody said something on TV that annoys me” and “that person should be in prison” appear to be strengthening. Here the president was on Truth Social yesterday evening railing against former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie:

I just watched Sloppy Chris Christie be interviewed on a ratings challenged “News” Show, “This Week With George Slopadopolus,” on ABC Fake News (By the way, what the “hell” happened to Jonathan Karl’s hair? He looks absolutely terrible! It’s amazing what bad ratings, on a failed television show that was forced to pay me $16,000,000, can do to one’s appearance!). Can anyone believe anything that Sloppy Chris says? Do you remember the way he lied about the dangerous and deadly closure of the George Washington Bridge in order to stay out of prison, at the same time sacrificing people who worked for him, including a young mother, who spent years trying to fight off the vicious charges against her. Chris refused to take responsibility for these criminal acts. For the sake of JUSTICE, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again? NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT

In the ABC appearance, Christie argued that Trump didn’t care about maintaining the traditional separation between the president’s political aims and the Justice Department’s legal objectives. Boy, Trump sure proved him wrong!

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Cheap Shots

1. Abrego Garcia has been accused of driving other illegal immigrants across the country, a far less serious crime than trafficking, which involves transporting people against their will.