COMMENTARY: Khrushchev Said Democracy Will Crack from Within
Donnie Johnston weighs in on Trump, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Supreme Court, and the future of American freedom.
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
Donald Trump stuck it to the Supreme Court again last week.
Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was (presumably) mistakenly deported by ICE some weeks ago?
/Remember that the Supreme Court gave the Trump Administration four days to bring Garcia back and ordered that reports on progress for his return be made daily during that period?
Remember that the only reports made were nothing more than one paragraph memos saying that Garcia was alive in a maximum security prison in his native El Salvador?
The high court had ordered Garcia returned by last Tuesday. Guess who showed up on Monday? No, not Garcia but El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who just happened (ha ha) to be in town.
From the Oval Office, surrounded by Trump and members of his administration, Bukele stated that he was absolutely refusing to release Garcia and intimated that he might remain in the United States funded prison for life.
You think that wasn’t a set-up? Even a blind man could see that Trump had instructed Bukele to make that statement, perhaps promising tax dollars for his cooperation. Now Trump had his out. If the El Salvadorian president refused to return Garcia, Trump was powerless to comply with the Supreme Court’s order. He was smiling through every orifice of his body.
It should be noted here that Garcia was in the United States legally and that the Trump Administration could produce no evidence that the Maryland man had committed any crime or belonged to any terrorist organization. ICE was apparently just rounding up Hispanics and Garcia, who was at a bus stop to pick up his children from school, got caught in the net.
But even if he had been accused of a crime, Garcia was due his day in court. That’s the way we do it here in America, at least before Jan. 20 of this year. It is called due process, the rule of law, and it separates a free and democratic society from a land of tyranny, where we now seem headed.
But more than that, it is a matter of human rights. You don’t just pick a man up off the streets and ship him off to a prison in another country for no other reason than you want to remove those of his race from your society. Hitler shipped Jews on trains to prison camps in Poland. Trump ships Hispanics by plane to prison camps in El Salvador.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, during a press conference, was even so callous as to remark, “Based on the sensationalism of many of the people in this room, we deported a candidate for father of the year.”
We’re talking about a man’s life here, a husband, a father, a son, a brother. Moreover, we’re talking about a man who came to America because he believed that such things do not happen to people here. In this country, even mass murderers get the benefit of a trial. But that was America before Trump.
The prisons in El Salvador (yes, we are funding at least one of them) seem to be part of Trump’s plan of intimidation. Send these people to this hard-core facility and show video of them in chains on American TV. That way no Hispanic will want to come to bring his family to America for fear of being shipped off to an El Salvadorian prison.
Of course, if that doesn’t work, there are always Elon Musk’s rockets that could take illegal aliens to another galaxy from which there would be absolutely no chance of them wading across the Rio Grande again.
The Garcia case is the latest example of Donald Trump thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court and the rule of law in general. He has shown the high court that it has no say in what he does or how he does it.
And the Republican Congress, in its refusal to stand up to Trump during the first weeks of his presidency, has lost control of its power.
We are no longer ruled by a legally elected Congress, but by a man whose executive orders dictate policy. And if he refuses to obey court orders and no one calls his bluff, he is in complete authority.
Americans who defy Trump may soon go the way of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If you do it to one human being, you can do it to another. As the Nazis discovered, it gets easier with each one.
Donald Trump could have had Garcia back in this country in a matter of hours. No small country, tied to America’s purse strings, is going to defy the president on such an insignificant request.
Trump didn’t want Garcia back. More importantly, he wanted to make a point that the Supreme Court — or any court — has no power over him. He has so far achieved his goal.
Sixty-five years ago, Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev predicted that America’s democratic government would ultimately crack from within.
We may well be watching the glass of freedom shatter.
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