Trump takes jingoistic pride in forcing US companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. If they refuse, he threatens tariffs that would make exporting foreign-made products back to the US prohibitively expensive. And he couldn’t care less if this wrecks the global economy – so long as he can claim he’s making manufacturing in America great again.
Given that, you’d think Trump would take similar pride in locking up the rapists, murderers, terrorists, and drug traffickers he claims Biden’s open borders allowed to traipse into America. But he’s not — as the following excerpt from yesterday’s edition of The New York Times shows:
Shortly after the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend, the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, posted a three-minute video on social media. It featured shackled men being marched off a plane over a dramatic electronic soundtrack and into prison, where they were shaved bald.
Mr. Bukele also taunted the U.S. judge who unsuccessfully ordered the flights turned around, posting on X, ‘Oopsie … Too late,’ with a laughing emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared the video, as did Elon Musk. Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Bukele online, saying, ‘We will not forget!’
In other words, this wannabe dictator openly colluded with the strongman of El Salvador’s banana republic to mock a direct order from a federal judge. Of course, Trump is too much of a cheap shyster to see the national humiliation in groveling to El Salvador —begging them to imprison gang members America, the world’s top jailer, should be handling itself.
Alas, there seems no end to how far America will fall from grace. Meanwhile, Trump is brazenly defying a federal judge. But, as his VP “JV” Vance gloated, judges can issue orders until they’re blue in the face. Just let them try enforcing them.
Apropos of this, it speaks volumes that the Supreme Court is cowering in silence, complicit in his creeping dictatorship. But, ultimately, this is Trump proving that all the vaunted rules and norms of American democracy were nothing more than a house of cards.