On March 26, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum-security prison known for its extraordinarily harsh conditions. The Trump Administration has been deporting alleged members of gangs to CECOT Using the prisoners as a backdrop, Noem said:
First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.
The administration argues that the people who have been deported deserve the treatment they receive at CECOT. That is not the point. It cannot be the point, because the administration rounded up and deported a man to CECOT with no due process, no criminal record, and no convincing evidence that he was in a violent gang, against the order of a federal judge. They have since argued that this was an administrative error, and that they have no ability or obligation to correct it - to bring a man who must be presumed innocent back from the bottomless hole into which they had thrown him. They fought taking any responsibility until the Supreme Court told them that they had to facilitate his return. They are not only ignoring that order but laughing at it, to the point where the President of El Salvador dismissed complying with the Supreme Court's order as preposterous while sitting next to the President in the Oval Office.
If the violence of the men deported justifies the severity of the punishment, then the Trump Administration should rush to bring back a man who has been proven in any sense to have been violent. But they aren’t, because public safety is a pretext.
I realized that the image above reminded me of something I'd seen a long time ago. A photo op with prisoners, taken with relish in their submission:
As was memorably said about the first Trump Administration, at Abu Ghraib, the cruelty was the point. Some Americans might have been convinced that torture and other inhuman acts were necessary evils in a war on terror, but the abuses at Abu Ghraib shocked the nation because they went much further than that:
The soldiers involved in those crimes inflicted pain, physical and psychological, for its own sake.
Further still: they enjoyed it.
And, somehow, even further: they documented and celebrated it.
That celebration crosses a line, even for Trump, whose first administration inflicted pain but typically did not publicly wallow in it. As families were separated at the border, the administration did not release the number of children it had cut off from their parents, or publicize photos of them sobbing as they missed their parents.
But what was twenty years ago a national shame has become a governing philosophy. This is the Abu Ghraib presidency.
The wrongful deportations to prison are only the most visible example. The administration is destroying America’s foreign aid programs, including USAID, which will be a “death sentence” for millions of human beings around the world who depend on American assistance for food and life-saving medical treatment. Whether or not America should provide aid to foreign nations is not the point. The haphazard, abrupt way in which the aid was cut can only be the result of intentional cruelty. Again, that cruelty was celebrated, publicly, as Elon Musk crowed:
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.
In early April, Trump announced a raft of tariffs against countries around the world. While much of the reporting has been about a trade war with China, the crude and nonsensical in way in which the rates were calculated, and the impact on the American economy, there was another story that got less attention: the devastation of people who live in poor nations. The New York Times covered the likely effects on Lesotho, a nation of two million people whose annual GDP per capita is about $1,000. Compare that with the United States, whose GDP per capita is about $90,000. They got hit with the highest tariff that day, at 50%, because they had a proportionally large trade deficit. That deficit exists not because Lesotho is taking advantage of the United States, but because we can afford to buy what they produce and they simply cannot afford to buy what we produce. As the article points out, tariffs that limit Lesotho's ability to sell to the American market will devastate the economy of an already poor nation.
It is not just Lesotho. Extreme tariffs also hit Vietnam (46%), Pakistan (29%), Myanmar (44%), and Cambodia (49%). In all, hefty tariffs (greater than the already high 10% baseline) were announced on 31 nations with a GDP per capita of less than $5,000. These are countries that by and large do not have the financial reserves to weather the storm or divert to new markets; they will simply be plunged deeper into poverty. More than 3 billion people live in those nations. It would have been simple enough to exempt some of them from the tariffs; whatever reasons Trump has to pick fights not only with China, but close partners like Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, surely it was not necessary to punish Nigeria, Moldova, Sri Lanka, and Nicaragua. But they were there on the charts Trump proudly held up as he announced "Liberation Day."
We are fewer than three months into this administration.
These awful acts were committed on our behalf. As a nation, we voted for this; we are all complicit.
Trump's opposition has spent the last several years attacking the unconstitutionality of Trump's actions, in the belief that the American public would be roused to defend our Constitution. For example, David French wrote this week:
In this moment, think of the courts as a rear guard, capable of delaying constitutional collapse until the American people finally understand that the life and health of the Constitution is up to them. If they keep electing men like Trump or sycophants like those in his Congress of cowards, then we’ll lose our Republic.
But if a critical mass of Americans do wake up, then the court’s stand will be indispensable to justice and — critically — accountability.
While we wait for that, I wonder: when will Americans wake up and rise to defend our national character?