Nayib Bukele, 2028 Republican Frontrunner
The heir to the MAGA id isn’t JD Vance or Don Jr. It’s the dictator of El Salvador.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become the face of the migrants deported to El Salvador for a simple reason: He was the one whose process rights were most trampled by the mass deportation, since a judge had formerly ruled he couldn’t be deported there and administration lawyers acknowledged he was erroneously included in the operation.
Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that a second migrant had been sent to the CECOT prison in violation of a previous court order. Here’s ABC News:
A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man deported to El Salvador, whose removal violated a previous court settlement, according to an order issued on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, also ordered the government not to remove other individuals covered by the settlement.
The judge did not buy the Trump administration’s argument that its unilateral designation of the man as an “alien enemy” . . . “results in him ceasing to be” covered by the former order blocking his deportation. Happy Thursday.
Nayib Bukele, Ventriloquist
by Andrew Egger
The hottest new trend in GOP political messaging is parroting the literal regime propaganda of central American tinpot authoritarians.
When Sen. Chris Van Hollen announced a trip to El Salvador last week to shine a spotlight on the plight of the migrants deported to a prison there, the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, plainly wasn’t sure how to respond. El Salvadoran officials initially blocked Van Hollen’s request to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Then they reversed themselves, abruptly coordinating a last-minute sit-down between the senator and the wrongfully deported man. As photographers snapped pictures, a Bukele aide placed two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table. Bukele immediately posted a picture of the meeting, hooting that the pair had been “sipping margaritas” in the “tropical paradise of El Salvador.”
That Bukele would engage in such hamfisted agitprop wasn’t a surprise. He’s a tinpot dictator. They do these things.
But even after Van Hollen revealed it was all a setup, Bukele’s claim is still emanating from the mouths of American politicians.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) announced this week she intended to meet with Bukele, “unlike Sen. Van Hollen, who drank margaritas with a cartel member.” When a pair of Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tried to coordinate official travel to El Salvador, the committee denied their travel request, sneering online about their “request to visit a foreign MS-13 gang member in El Salvador on taxpayer dollars (and possibly drink margaritas).” When the Democrats went to El Salvador anyway—only to be turned away from the prison by Bukele’s government—Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) took a victory lap on Fox News, jeering that Democrats had wanted “a photo op and to have margaritas and enjoy the sunny weather.”
Even some of our more MAGA-happy Democrats are getting in on the action. New York City Mayor Eric Adams indulged in a swing at Van Hollen in a Tuesday press conference, clowning on “those who are in government” who would “have a tequila drink with someone who’s a gang member.” “Whose side are you on?” Adams asked.
I’m not naïve here: U.S. politicians have never been above lying when they think it suits their interests and when they can get away with it. But, I’m sorry: I thought this was America. Don’t our politicians feel like our voting public has a gag reflex against parroting foreign despots? Isn’t there still a sense that indulging open, Orwellian lies hurts the case they’re trying to make? Is there truly more advantage to be gained from insisting on the “margaritas” line than there is to be lost by people reasonably wondering, If they’ll go along with this, what else are they lying about?
It’s bad enough that the White House and the Republican base have been willing to let the U.S. government deputize El Salvador and its horrifying prison system as part of its One Weird Trick to Short-Circuit Legal Due Process for Deportees. But phenomena like this show that the rot goes deeper than that. Many Republicans are simply El Salvador-aspirational: They’d rather live in a system where their strongman decrees not only what the law is, but what the truth itself is.
A free people with a healthy skepticism of what any government has to say—let alone the government of El Salvador—shouldn’t let them get away with it.
The American People Still Believe in the Rule of Law. The Trump Administration Doesn’t.
by Bill Kristol
Last night, the Justice Department submitted a filing in federal district court in a deportation case, D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It’s a shocking document.
As NYU law professor Ryan Goodman writes, the Trump administration “appears to openly describe steps the government took to essentially evade the court’s temporary restraining order.”
Goodman explains that on March 28, the district court had ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice not to deport any individual with a final removal order, “UNLESS and UNTIL Defendants provide that individual, and their respective immigration counsel, if any, with written notice of the third country to where they may be removed, and UNTIL Defendants provide a meaningful opportunity for that individual to submit an application for CAT [Convention Against Torture] protection to the immigration court.”
Last night, the Trump administration acknowledged to the court that individuals were in fact sent to El Salvador without such notice on March 31, three days after the court’s order. The administration’s explanation? The removal to El Salvador was carried out not by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but by the Department of Defense (DOD), which is not a named defendant in the case.
Leave aside the question of whether this defense would work even if it were made in good faith (the two agencies are part of one administration, after all). But this was not a case of one agency not knowing what another was doing. For how did DOD get custody of these individuals? From DHS. DHS transferred these individuals to DOD—after the court’s original order—so that DOD could fly them to El Salvador a few days later.
As Goodman concludes: “This switch from one department (a named defendant) to the other is not cunning. It appears to be a violation of the court’s order in spirit and in law.”
Such a blatant evasion of a court order will surely be intolerable to the courts. It should also be intolerable to Congress, which has oversight authority over both executive branch agencies, and which should have an interest in knowing who at DHS and DOD decided on this end-run of a federal court’s clear restraining order, and who at the White House ordered or approved.
This should also be intolerable to the American people. And, in fact, it is.
In a Fox News poll conducted earlier this month, respondents were informed that “some federal district court judges have challenged the Trump administration on policies such as deporting illegal immigrants and firing executive branch workers.” Fox then asked if these judges are “legitimately exercising their power in accordance with the Constitution’s system of checks and balances,” or whether they are ”unlawfully interfering with the president’s constitutional authority to run the executive branch of government?” Fifty-eight percent responded that the courts were legitimately exercising their power. Thirty-three percent said that they were unlawfully interfering with the president’s constitutional authority.
Pew also asked what should happen if a federal court finds that a Trump administration action is illegal. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the administration should follow the court’s ruling and stop its action. Nineteen percent said the administration doesn’t have to follow the court ruling.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in the field late last week found an even more lopsided result. Eighty-three percent of respondents answered that the administration should follow federal court decisions it opposes, with only 13 percent disagreeing.
So the Trump administration is trying to defy court decisions and the American people disapprove. Couldn’t Democrats be making a bigger deal of it? Couldn’t Republican elected officials be asked more often about it?
The American people, for all their susceptibility to Trumpist demagoguery, still believe in the rule of law. The Trump administration doesn’t.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Donald Trump Has a Family Policy. Stop Laughing… The administration wants (some) people to have more kids, observes MONA CHAREN.
Trump doesn’t want you to see this… On Bulwark+ Takes, ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO is joined by CHRIS NEWMAN, lawyer for Kilmer Abrego Garcia. Newman shared his firsthand experience confronting authorities, fighting for Abrego Garcia’s rights, and exposing the dangerous similarities between the past three years in El Salvador and the current political climate of the United States.
Chicago and Nashville, Here We Come… Sign up to get tickets to see SARAH, JVL, and TIM (among others), coming up in the last week of May.
Quick Hits
WASHING OUR HANDS OF UKRAINE: The White House appears ready to make its abandonment of Ukraine official. Here’s the New York Times:
President Trump and his top aides demanded on Wednesday that Ukraine accede to an American-designed proposal that would essentially grant Russia all the territory it has gained in the war, while offering Kyiv only vague security assurances.
The American plan, which would also explicitly block Ukraine from ever joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was rejected by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, whose long-running dispute with Mr. Trump broke into the open two months ago in the Oval Office. The proposal also appears to call for the United States to recognize Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea, a region of Ukraine.
“There is nothing to talk about,” Mr. Zelensky said. “This violated our Constitution. This is our territory, the territory of Ukraine.”
Mr. Trump shot back on social media that the Ukrainian president was being “inflammatory” and said he would only “prolong the ‘killing field.’”
Your Morning Shots correspondents discussed the whole grim spectacle at length on video yesterday. That was before news broke about Russia launching a deadly bombing attack on Kyiv, which reportedly killed at least eight in the capital city. Trump made a rare post critical of Putin in response to the news. But one would be hard pressed to see him change course at this juncture. The White House seems keen on lecturing the Ukrainians about how grateful they ought to be for the privilege of getting screwed by both us and their invaders.
SCHEDULE F FIGHT STARTS: Back in the somewhat innocent days before we realized Trump’s plan for downsizing the federal government would be “letting Elon Musk loose with a chainsaw,” there was a lot of concern that he would consolidate power by stripping civil service protections from a huge numbers of career federal employees by reclassifying them as “Schedule F” political appointees. This week, acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek announced that staff at his agency should prepare for exactly that, writing in an internal email that the change would be rolled out “within the next 90 days.”
Employee unions are gearing up to fight back. The American Federation of Government Employees has filed litigation challenging the proposed change, arguing that Schedule F should only apply to employees with important policy-making duties, not employees who implement political appointees’ policy determinations.
“We are line employees to use the phrase in the Administration’s fact sheet, and we should have been excluded from any Schedule F plan,” an AFGE representative said in an email to union members this week viewed by The Bulwark. “This is a massive overreach by the Agency that is inconsistent with the Administration’s own guidance. . . . In the meantime, employees should continue to do great work on behalf of the American people, as they have been.”
In that same email, the representative revealed that “thousands of SSA employees” were being reclassified as Schedule F political appointees under this new Trump plan.
BLAVATNIK RESPONDS: In Monday’s newsletter, we shared a report from the Counteroffensive’s Tim Mak, spotlighting business ties between Trump’s envoy to Vladimir Putin, Steve Witkoff, and Russian expat businessman Leonard Blavatnik. Yesterday, a representative for Blavatnik reached out to us pushing back hotly on Mak’s suggestion that Blavatnik represented a conflict-of-interest for Witkoff.
“Len Blavatnik has not spoken to Steve Witkoff about the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, nor has he been asked about it,” the representative told The Bulwark. “He has no involvement and has no interest in being involved.”
The representative added that “Len has absolutely no significant relationships in Kremlin circles” and “no contact with any of his old business partners in Russia.” They called suggestions otherwise: “guilt-by-previous-association speculation” that was “wildly inaccurate and unfair.”
What we found concerning and notable about Mak’s post was the way it spotlighted the potential hazards of running large portions of U.S. diplomacy through a business guy on short-term loan to the U.S. government. But we thought it was only fair to pass along Blavatnik’s perspective here as well.
Cheap Shots
"I’m not naïve here: U.S. politicians have never been above lying when they think it suits their interests and when they can get away with it. But, I’m sorry: I thought this was America. Don’t our politicians feel like our voting public has a gag reflex against parroting foreign despots? Isn’t there still a sense that indulging open, Orwellian lies hurts the case they’re trying to make?"
The problem with this attempt to inject reason and morality into the discussion is that we have allowed a system to emerge in which there are no consequences for the extreme political biases and bad behaviors that we see taking place with our politicians and political officeholders. It's quite easy to violate cultural norms and longstanding societal expectations when you know that the voters will not demand better from you, and your boss, in the White House or otherwise, has your back because you are a loyalist who has essentially one person who needs to be pleased. As he/she goes, so go you, the rest of us be damned. It is a license to behave badly, with no clear expiration date, and the temptation is too great for those who put personal ambition over public service and the example that they set for others to follow.
We are learning in real time that the honor system, though it served us well for quite a long time, doesn't work when there is no power of enforcement and bad people seek to milk the situation not just by doing what was deemed wrong before, but actually reveling in it and rubbing it in people's faces that they can get away with it. The surprise is not that they are doing it, with a permission structure that encourages it. Rather it is that it took us so long for gravity to work in this case, driving downward both our demands and our expectations when we've become accustomed to a climate in which owning the libs, and showing them that you enjoy it, is more important than anything else. I ask myself often how a Hegseth can get away with what he has done while the rest of us would be fired and/or prosecuted for the same offenses, and how we are held to a much higher threshold of what constitutes punishable offenses. Then I realize that, as they see it, rules are for suckers and losers and political opponents -- the buddy system has defeated the honor system, and we all are worse off for it. And it will not change anytime soon, as long as voters and constituents lack the courage, and a stronger ambition, to set things right.
Just when I thought that the GOPAMAGA (chupacabra?) can't sink any lower, here we are: kowtowing to Bukkake, the 3rd rate dictator. This is amazing, but no wonder. Trump was writing love letters to Kim, Putin and Xi. Not many Americans speak Korean, Russian or Chinese. But it seems that gopamaga discovered that they are very good at kissing ass and s**ing d*ck in Spanish.
When will gopamaga find a spine? When will they rediscover that being American means being practical, charitable, having an appreciation for science, education and clean government, among others? What the actual fuck? How long before this hell ends?