"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
-----Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
President Donald Trump has endorsed sending "the worst of the worst" criminals (i.e., anybody he so labels, regardless of what the facts show) to a foreign gulag for life whenever he sees fit. Trump revealed this view during a meeting with Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele at the White House, where both men agreed nothing should or would be done to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who ICE agents kidnapped and mistakenly sent to Bukele's notorious mega-prison CECOT due to what they called an "administrative error" last month. Trump labeled Garcia a MS-13 gang member and Bukele gratuitously proclaimed him a "terrorist," though there is no evidence he was even a criminal, much less a political actor using violence to force changes in government policy. In any event, neither president sees any reason to try to correct the error and return Garcia to his life and family in the United States, so he continues to rot in a Salvadorean prison.
Trump's interpretation of presidential power to justify such outrages is the one U.S. presidents always use: that we are at war with evildoers and so are obliged to toss aside trivialities like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the latest iteration of this farce Trump has stripped away the rights of foreign workers, natural residents, and even naturalized citizens, with birth citizens soon to be persecuted for thought crimes, another venerable American tradition. When questioned about the legitimacy of his self-serving views, Trump asked without irony if there were any reason to regard U.S. citizens as a special class deserving of protection, regarding it as self-evident that once he labels U.S. citizens or anybody else "criminal," they deserve to be treated as sub-human. Clearly, the president sees no reason to acknowledge that U.S. law enforcement has the dual purpose of punishing criminal conduct and protecting individual rights, with the latter responsibility being the more important of the two, since without rights the state itself becomes boundlessly criminal, and no one can escape being victimized by its crimes on a constant basis. Indeed, he may not even understand these responsibilities.
It is easy enough to mock Trump's buffoonish approach to governance, but this only misses the forest for the trees. All of U.S. history shows that the law has only the most tangential relation to power, and is promptly cast to the flames whenever authority or profit is at stake. The USA really was founded on slavery and mass extermination, with the presumed legitimacy of the first written into the Constitution itself, and official justification of the latter codified in the Declaration of Independence as self-defense against "merciless Indian savages." It took the law centuries to ban slavery while a century-and-a-half later it still hasn't provided even the merest pretense of legal justification for the robbery of Indian lands, upon which the very existence of the United States depends.
So president Trump should properly be seen as the culmination of a process of contempt for human rights, not an aberration from a tradition of upholding them. He is able to use ICE as his personal kidnapping force only because George W. Bush invented the agency out of thin air as part of his modest ambition to "rid the world of evil." He may get away with dispatching U.S. citizens to a foreign dungeon because Obama already got away with murdering a U.S. citizen on foreign soil. He can attract support for making America "great" again by seizing Greenland or annexing Canada because our schoolbooks and media mouthpieces have long taught us that U.S. conquest and expansion are by definition glorious.
In other words, bringing down Trump, which more and more people want to see done, may require that we repudiate the long tradition of Trumpism that preceded his rise to power, that is, if we really intend to get rid of arbitrary rule.
After all, if George W. Bush could rig intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and then destroy Iraq on that false pretext, why can't Trump rig intelligence to show that Iran has nukes and later bomb Teheran? If McKinley could grab Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, why can't Trump take Greenland and the Panama Canal? If John F. Kennedy could invade Cuba and Vietnam, why can't Trump invade Mexico?
Trump's rule by executive fiat is the consequence of what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim once identified as "anomie" - literally normlessness - a state of intellectual vertigo owing to a complete lack of coherent expectations regulating conduct. We have arrived at this state of affairs because a long line of U.S. leaders and their media propagandists have obliterated rationality with double-talk and lies, leaving Trump an intellectual black hole that allows him to "govern" by authoritarian impulse.
The only potential plus in all this is that power weakens as legitimacy erodes, and the whims of an ignorant narcissist are provoking massive discontent.
And thus the U.S. empire implodes with gathering momentum.