Donald Trump is putting all his chips down on a hand he may not win
The last thing the Trump regime should want is for the accidental deportation of an innocent man to become a public referendum on its anti-immigration policy. This was supposed to be about deporting criminals and menaces to society. The story of Kilmar Ábrego García is precisely the opposite of that. But the Trump regime never does have any sense about these things.
Instead of bringing García home as quickly and quietly as possible, the Trump regime has doubled down on its mistake. Even after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Trump regime must facilitate García’s return to the United States, the regime is still making excuses for refusing to do so. It’s gotten absurd enough that the federal judge overseeing the original case is now threatening to hold the Trump regime in contempt of court.
That’s right, Donald Trump and his regime – who are already historically unpopular and in the midst of losing a trade war in ugly fashion – have now decided to put all their chips down on trying to somehow force the Supreme Court to give up on its own unanimous ruling so that it can make sure a man from Maryland stays imprisoned in El Salvador. That might be the stupidest sentence I’ve ever typed, which gives you an idea of how far out on a ledge the Trump regime is with this.
The upside for the Trump regime is that if it can win this battle, the concept of judicial review will cease to exist, and the Trump regime will be able to do anything it wants. But even with as widely hated as the current incarnation of the Supreme Court may be, most Americans have had it drilled into them since fifth grade social studies class that the Supreme Court has the final say in this country. Even if there were a legal case that the Trump regime could come up with to convince the public otherwise, this isn’t it. Not within a mile.
So how specifically will this end up playing out? That’s really difficult to say. I still believe Chief Justice John Roberts holds all the cards, because if the Trump regime tries to defy him on this and can’t pull it off, Roberts can then have the Supreme Court rule against the Trump regime left and right on subsequent cases. If anyone in the Trump regime has even an elementary level of understanding of how politics works, they’ll figure that out, quietly drop the whole thing, and hope everyone forgets about it.
Then again, we have yet to see anyone in the Trump regime display even a milliliter of common sense or political savvy. Maybe a senile Trump and his band of two year olds really will try to convince the general public to let them overthrow the Supreme Court in the name of keeping an innocent guy from Maryland in a foreign prison. If so, good luck. This is not a winning hand for Trump. We’ll see how long Trump wants to keep playing it.
