By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
If you have been watching the news, Trump is flexing his executive muscles by intimating that if he had his druthers, he would export American “hardened” criminals to the notorious gulag that is in El Salvador.
Never mind that Trump and the president of El Salvador met this past week in the White House and the El Salvadoran president said, with a straight face, that he is unable to release Abrego Garcia from his country’s jail. This is a country that he rules and runs with an iron fist but he is without any means to release a wrongfully imprisoned person!
This president belongs in the clown car along with Trump, both lying through their teeth that they are powerless to do anything about the mistake that America made in shipping this person to the El Salvador gulag.
Now remember, The United States and El Salvador have a contract, a paid contract by which El Salvador is willing to take in purported gang members of another country into their prison system. It makes you wonder, what department of our government authorized those monies and how do we pay a foreign government for prison services?
Now, being emboldened, Trump’s puppets are now stating, again with a straight face that, after all, this prisoner was in fact properly shipped to the gulag which is a direct contradiction with the US Supreme Court which ordered the Trump administration to return the prisoner.
Because Trump is itching for a fight with the Supreme Court in order to test his moxie with the justices and to see who will not bend their judicial powers to him.
What you have my dear reader is a constitutional crisis of the first degree. A monumental challenge to the rule of law being posited by a branch of government against another co-equal branch of government.
If and when the GOP Supreme Court judges stop clutching their pearls, they will realize that Trump is willing to spin the cylinder on the pistol with one bullet in the gun and see who blinks first.
Trump, the convicted felon, has no respect for the rule of law or the constitution. It is readily apparent that he has not even read it and much less is willing to honor and support its continued viability.
For Trump, attacking the federal judiciary is his boldest gambit to tell the courts, “You don’t like it….well come and do something about it!”
Trump understands that the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its decrees other than to hold someone in contempt of court but for a person of Trump’s corrupted sense of right and wrong, contempt means nothing for him or to him.
A person who can dodge two impeachments attempts (one directly attributable to the cowardice of Senator Mitch McConnell) and be elected as the first felon president in the history of the country, to him, a contempt finding is a walk in the park.
As Trump continues to flood the airwaves with executive orders ad nauseam, one fight that he is dying to pick with is one of the premier colleges in America, Harvard. Trump wants Harvard to give him practically unlimited access to the innards of its teaching curriculum including the exclusion of any D.E.I. policies and oversight over student admissions, among other areas of control.
In Trump bizzarro world of irrational thinking, if he can brow beat Harvard to capitulate, it could mean the end of academic autonomy, freedom of speech and assembly.
Enough “premier” colleges have thrown in the towel and have agreed to his whipping boy changes, and everlasting shame on them!
And what happens when the Supreme Court rules against Trump and his sycophants and they need to enforce their rulings? Simple. You will have a crisis heretofore unknown in the history of jurisprudence in this country.
Who will enforce any discipline meted out by the highest court in the land? The court has no
Army or Navy to fight the good fight. They have the U.S. Marshals who are controlled by the
feckless Pam Bondi who would rather walk barefoot on glass shards than betray her fearless leader.
What you would have is an embarrassing standoff between Trump/MAGA and the highest court in the land trying to maintain a semblance of judicial integrity while a scoundrel like Trump would laugh in their collective faces.
Would the GOP in Congress then be emboldened to implement the 25th amendment which would allow for his removal? If they love liberty and the rule of law like they give lip service to they might, but don’t count on it.
If the 25th amendment would not be implemented or if implemented but it failed in its mission, all I can say is “Welcome to the newest member of the Banana Republics!”
And as for a possible third term that Trump boast about achieving, he then simply declares a national emergency six months before the 2028 election, stays in office and voila! King Trump reigns supreme!
Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
Contact Lafe Tolliver at tolliver@juno.com