The Troll in the Oval Office

Legacy media ignores the big picture again

Owning the libs is a deeply cherished right-wing pastime. Fox News built a multi-billion dollar empire on the premise. It is the animating force of the MAGA movement.

But now the same people who spent years waving their pocket constitutions around are finding that their performative constitution-humping is running up against their favorite hobby. And it turns out that owning the libs by telling them to “cry more” over Donald Trump’s torching of the constitution is more important than upholding the rule of law.

It took fewer than 100 days for Trump to give the finger to the judicial and legislative branches and to eradicate the separation of powers that has served this country so well for centuries.

On Saturday, a Department of State bureaucrat named Michael G. Kozak attested under penalty of perjury that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who the Trump Administration admitted it wrongly deported, is alive and still incarcerated at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. “He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador,” Kozak swore.

On Sunday, another Homeland Security bureaucrat named Evan Katz declared under penalty of perjury that the government now deems Abrego Garcia a member of the MS-13 gang. Why? Because he cannot prove that he isn’t. How’s that for the deeply cherished American concept of innocent until proven guilty? (Katz can’t prove that he isn’t a member of M-13 either but for some reason he hasn’t been rendered to a Salvadorian hellhole yet.)

These sworn attestations would be laughable if they were not so tragic. The United States government pays El Salvador $6 million to house the prisoners it deported to CECOT. Today, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is meeting with Trump at the White House, where, according to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, he and Trump “will discuss El Salvador’s partnership on using their super max prison for Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members and how El Salvador’s cooperation with the United States has become a model for others to work with this administration.”

This “sovereign, domestic authority” of El Salvador that ostensibly ties the hands of the most powerful nation on earth would collapse in about thirty seconds if Trump demanded that Bukele return Abrego Garcia.

This episode is about much more than just the immoral detention of one migrant.