Marble Falls      Anyone who believes the White House performance that President Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador put on was anything other than a charade is fooling themselves.  If that’s not the case, they’re smoking something illegal, and I have a bridge across the Mississippi River that I would love to sell them.  This was a totally nothing, more than bad acting in a tragic play.  Even the stagecraft kind of sucked.

In order to pretend not to be blatantly ignoring a specific order of the Supreme Court to return a man that they had admitted was deported to a prison in El Salvador mistakenly, they orchestrated this farce.  There is no way that I believe the White House and the president didn’t give a holler to this self-declared “dictator” of El Salvador to come running up to DC, as soon as he could manage.  The former dog-shooting governor of South Dakota, now the head of the Department of Homeland Security had claimed they couldn’t return the man from El Salvador because it was a “sovereign” country, and they wouldn’t be able to tell them what to do.  Who are they kidding?  Trump and his administration are trying to bully countries all around the world to do their bidding, along with law firms and universities.  El Salvador standing up the Trump and the United States would probably provoke belly laughs from the Trump team, if they noticed it at all.  El Salvador is simply an enabler of Trump’s extra-juridical impunity.  As a broke-ass country, whose dictator has also made terrible crypto bets, they are also desperate for the huge amounts of money that the United States is paying them to keep these prisoners, as well, even further complicating any notion that this is little more than political theater.  To call this contempt of court, as the family will now surely seek, is too mild.  This is an illegal rebellion led by the President of the United States against the courts, judges, and any pretense of following the law.  Make them do right!

This whole deportation stunt of 238 men to El Salvador’s so-called “terrorist” maximum security prison is also an outrage that goes way past the case of Abrego Garcia.  A team from the New York Times did the country a public service by investigating the records of the whole planeload.  Thirty-two had serious rap sheets.  Twenty-four had two-bit offenses for things like speeding in a school zone or driving unregistered vehicles.  182, after extensive investigation and research, came up clean.  DHS and Noem obviously haven’t shared any of the reasons for deporting them other than they had the power to do so, so they did so.  It is unbelievable to me that this could happen in America.

If any reader or listener has any doubt that this was anything other than a cruel and callous charade, they need to view the footage of Trump and the dictator yuking it up.  He played his part, essentially saying “no way” he was going to release anyone, in a scripted remark easy for him to remember, when we all know that the second the US is not paying for the room and board in this prison over the next year of their supposedly mandatory one-year sentence, they will all be out on the streets.

Meanwhile in a horrifying exchange coupled with gleeful laughter, Trump egged the dictator on saying to build “five more prisons,” so he could also fill them up with what he called “homegrowns.”  Given how flimsy the excuses are for picking these folks off the streets, from their homes, businesses, and other appointments, all of us “homegrowns,” meaning US citizens who oppose this and other policies of the autocratic regime and its leader, certainly understood the message he was ending.  At one point, he vaguely mentioned checking to see what was legal, but that was clearly a throwaway line, and absolutely not repeated in the hot mic recording between him and the dictator.

There’s nothing about any of this that does anything but smell to high heaven.  All of this should be an embarrassment and humiliation to any proud American citizen. The constitutional crisis is now. The courts need to stomp their feet down and order this to stop. The public needs to demand the government provide justice to offset these abuses of power.