Here comes the cavalry
This week Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen carried out a perfect strategy for (first and foremost) getting the necessary result and (as a bonus) making himself and his party look good. He parked himself in El Salvador and very publicly refused to leave until he was allowed to meet with wrongly imprisoned Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia. El Salvador not only caved and let the meeting happened, it panicked and made sure the resulting photo op took place in a nice restaurant instead of in the prison. Kilmar isn’t home yet, but Van Hollen’s strategy appears to have put that irrevocably in motion. El Salvador now appears to be more scared of mainstream America than it is of Trump.
Of course this perfectly executed strategy still came with all the nonsense cries from self styled political pundits everywhere: “Why was Van Hollen the only Democrat who had the courage to go?” The people who talk like this are clueless, of course. Imagine fifty Democratic Senators and Representatives camped out in El Salvador, all standing there and looking foolish bumping into each other while waiting for El Salvador to cave. That’s not how to make things happen. Instead the Democrats sent Van Hollen, who happens to be Kilmar’s Senator in Maryland, and the sharply focused strategy worked. Now comes phase two, which is already beginning to play out.
Van Hollen left El Salvador today, having got what he had demanded. But because Kilmar is still locked up there, he very publicly announced on his way out the door that additional Senators and Representatives are coming to take his place. This is how you carry out effective strategy. Now that El Salvador has begun caving, you keep piling on incrementally until Kilmar is on a plane ride home. Meanwhile the fallout is continuing.
Now that Kilmar has had a chance to tell his side of the story, the truth is coming out. He was indeed held in a horrific prison in El Salvador for weeks, but in insolation the entire time – presumably because El Salvador was worried he might end up dead. Kilmar has also revealed that nine days ago, El Salvador transferred him to a better prison, which reveals the timeline of when El Salvador first began to realize that it was in over its head with its deal with Trump.
This is also a wildly different version of events than what the Trump regime swore in its court filings was playing out with Mr. Garcia. This kind of discrepancy is a good way for the Trump regime to weaken its own legal case, and by extension weaken its ability to try to convince the general public that it should be allowed to overthrow the Supreme Court. This is likely a big part of why the Trump regime has been doubling down on trying to keep him locked up and unable to talk to anyone. Now that he’s telling his story, it’s an even uglier scandal for the Trump regime.
With El Salvador continuing to cave, with Kilmar being able to begin telling his story, and with the Democrats carrying out a strategy of continuing to ramp up attention and pressure, it’s difficult to imagine this ending in any other way than Kilmar eventually coming home – as long as we continue to do our part by playing up the story and making it important. The real question is how far out on a ledge the Trump regime wants to climb with this scandal before inevitably realizing it just doesn’t have the muscle to win this. Given the sheer senility of Trump himself and the sheer stupidity of the people running his regime for him, that could take awhile.
