These People Are a Joke

Want to see how much of a pretzel Trumpers have twisted themselves into in order to justify the abduction and unlawful rendition of Kilmar Abrego García? Check out this lede from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the alleged MS-13 member who was deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT megaprison last month, told ICE officers he didn’t fear returning to Central America before being loaded onto a one-way flight to his home country, sources tell The Post.

Abrego’s Garcia’s admission undercuts a statement he gave to the feds in 2019 expressing that he did in fact fear returning to El Salvador due to the threat of gang violence.

“Sources tell The Post.” Right.

According to the Post, a “source” also “told a Hyattsville City Police Department detective that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13’s Western clique who carried the rank of ‘Chequeo’ and the moniker ‘Chele,’ according to a gang field interview sheet.”

(The New York Post, like all MAGA propaganda arms, has failed to disclose that the Hyattsville detective who made this claim was indicted for sharing “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker.” If we still had due process in this country, one can only imagine what a defense lawyer would do with a disgraced cop on the stand who alleged without a scintilla of evidence that Abrego Garcia was a gang member.

On Tuesday night, I asked my CNN sparring partner Scott Jennings why he believed that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13. “I’ve got two heads of state telling me that,” Jennings responded.

Right. Donald Trump, who is, uh, known for his veracity the world over, and Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, who is being paid millions to house Abrego Garcia and other illegally rendered migrants in his maximum security gulag, is telling Jennings that. What other due process than that could possibly be necessary to establish guilt?

What next? An anonymous “confidential source” telling the New York Post that Joe Biden is a member of the Crypts and should therefore be locked up in the supermax facility in Florence, Colorado? Trump and Vladimir Putin telling Jennings that Ksenia Petrova, the Harvard researcher who was arrested at Logan Airport in Boston despite working in the country legally, is a member of the Bloods and should therefore be rendered back to Russia, where she would be immediately imprisoned?

The contortions would be embarrassing to witness if they were coming from children. But they are coming from paid propagandist shills who know better. And to be clear, they know better. But the allure of getting a pat on the head from the president for carrying his toxic water is too strong to resist.

Just imagine for a moment the reaction if Elon Musk had been deported to a South African prison last year because Joe Biden and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced to the world that he was a capo in some drug gang. The MAGAsphere would be screaming about due process until their voice boxes collapsed — and rightly so.

These are the same people who constantly bleat on about law and order. They are the ones who wave their little pocket constitutions and wear their little American flag lapel pins and otherwise engage in performative jingoism to prove how much they love this country.

They may love the country that Trump is shaping — but they do not love its constitution. They do not love its system of checks and balances, its basic decency and its long-held belief that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

If this is the country they want, they better be damn sure that they remain in power forever. And if they do remain in power forever, they better stow any discussions about the founding fathers or originalism or every other buzzword they use to prove their patriotism, because they will be delivering us into a dictatorship.

But if they do still have an ounce of allegiance to our democracy, they would be wise to reconsider their assault on the rule of law. Because one day, if they are not careful, someone might anonymously denounce them as an enemy of the people. Someone might throw them in prison without a trial because they serve as a useful plot device in a political narrative. That’s what happens when you break norms. You never know what might happen next once the guardrails are off.

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Further Reading:

The New York Post: Alleged MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar Abrego Garcia told ICE he wasn’t afraid to go back to Central America — before deportation to megaprison

USA Today: Disgraced Maryland police officer tied to 2019 Abrego Garcia gang report

The New York Times: She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her