The Trump administration has replaced the midwit progressive Wokesters with midwit conservative Wokesters

I was an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s intentionally anarchic, open border policy and supported President Trump’s decision to deport illegal criminal migrants.

However, as a result of the Trump administration’s sloppy strategic legalist reading of the two-hundred-twenty-seven-year-old Alien Enemies Act to justify their decision to fly 238 unidentified “bad people” to El Salvador’s modern day Devil’s Island (CECOT), I rescind my support until these operations are conducted in a manner that is consistent with the U.S. Constitution. The 5th Amendment protects even immigrants from “Deprivation of liberty without due process of law.”

It does not include a “Trust me bro, they’re really bad people” clause.

We have heard a lot in recent years about “lawfare,” the use of law “to achieve an operational objective.” We have heard much less about “strategic legalism,” the use of laws, legal arguments, or legal tools to advance larger policy objectives, irrespective of—and often at the expense of—facts and law.

“Lawfare” is rightly understood as the favored legal tactic of subalterns—the use of the law by the weak to force the strong to observe universal standards in their exercise of power. “Strategic legalism” has deeper, less celebrated, and even more consequential roots in American history. U.S. leaders used strategic legalism to release Nazis convicted at Nuremberg, free Mai Lai Massacre convict William Calley, prop up the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in exile, evade the International Court of Justice for mining Nicaragua’s harbors, justify inaction during the Rwandan genocide, and kidnap and torture suspected terrorists.

After less than two months in office, has President Trump morphed from Orange Caesar into Orange Caligula? Today his administration relies less on “strategic legalism” and more on the well-worn legal strategy of criminal defense attorneys with guilty clients: When the law is against you, argue the facts, when facts are against you, argue the law, when both are against you, attack the other side.

On March 15, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to stop the deportation of the supposed Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. Not only did the White House ignore the order, President Trump attacked the judge in an ALL CAPS Truth Social screed: “This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President – He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!”

More importantly, President Trump threatened to impeach the judge who dared rule against him: “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Most Americans do not want criminal illegal migrants in our country, but Trump doth protest too much. After all, Boasberg is the judge who released the Hillary Clinton emails. Although President Obama appointed him to the U.S. district court for the District of Columbia, President GW Bush first appointed Boasberg to Superior Court for the District of Columbia, and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts appointed him to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He is hardly comparable to Judge Arthur Engoron, the magistrate who presided over New York Attorney General Letitia James’s farcically flawed civil fraud case.

Trump’s threatening rant prompted a rare rebuke and warning from conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who wrote, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Unphased by the Supreme Court justice’s slap down, Fox News host now starring as Attorney General, Pam Bondi chastised Judge Boasberg for daring to question Orange Caligula. She accused him of “meddling in our government” and attempted to reframe the question at issue. “Why,” she asked from her Fox News bully pulpit, “is the judge trying to protect terrorists who invaded our country over American citizens?”

Finally, Bondi resorted to an ad hominem attack:“Today, a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans. TdA is represented by the ACLU.”

Although Tren de Aragua is a dangerous gang whose members should be deported, they are a strawman, not even a JV version of the Mexican cartels who until recently operated with impunity on our southern border. Wouldn’t the Trump administration’s charge of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States” apply more accurately to the Cartels and China? Even though their asymmetric Opiate War kills more Americans each year than the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the War on Terror combined, for decades, our leaders have turned a blind eye to it in the name of profit.

After the 1994 NAFTA agreement opened the southern border, the U.S. government, businesses, and financial institutions trumpeted “globalism” as the flattener of worlds and leveler of playing fields. As a result, they explained, anti-trust laws, banking regulations, unions, workers safety laws, environmental protection were now outdated and unnecessary hindrances to “the free market.”

Of course, the politicians they owned and their mandarins in the press agreed because multinational corporations needed cheap, exploitable labor to keep their production costs down. Under the messianic battle cry of “globalization,” millions of Latin Americans took their chances and traveled north. Worse, the U.S. government, businesses, and banks turned a blind eye to our most immediate national security threat—the Mexican Cartels.

In the old days, Mexican Dons paid their bills in cash, face-to-face. After NAFTA, the old Dons lost control. Under the new cartel system, politicians and police had only one choice—plata o plomo (silver or lead)—money or death. Unlike our government and many multi-national corporations, the cartels had liquidity, balanced books, production, distribution, transportation, protection, and insolvent American and international banks to launder their money. How can you hide the daily workings of multinational corporations that ships five tons of cocaine at a time into a nation whose military can read a wrist watch from outer space? You can’t. But as long as the rich got their cocaine, Cialis, Concerta, and Codones and the poor got their Crack, Smack, and Crystal, nobody seemed to mind, much less notice the greatest consolidation of wealth in human history.

The collateral damage of this laissez faire anarchy was not limited to just the American working class. After the U.S. began deporting immigrants convicted of felonies in the 1990s, hardened criminals with American gang affiliations returned to countries they no longer knew and established satellite branches of these gangs. By 2015, El Salvador had an estimated 55,000 gang members, 400,000 collaborators, and the highest murder rate in the world.

In 2022, El Salvador’s Supreme Court declared the two main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, “terrorist organizations.” Police arrested 55,000 gang members in seven months. Next, President Nayib Bukele announced the construction of the Terrorism Confinement Center, the Devil’s Panopticon, better known as CECOT. El Salvador has realized the model of punitive incarceration that Michel Foucault described in Discipline and Punishment. CECOT’s 14,000 inmates are not allowed personal items, visitors, or phone calls and spend only 30 minutes a day outside of their cells. The rest of the time they live in crowded cells, under the twenty-four-hour-a-day glare of neon lights and unblinking gaze of CCV cameras.

On March 22, after President Trump threatened to sentence the American “domestic terrorists” who are damaging Teslas, to twenty-year prison sentences, he added, “Perhaps they should serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”

Over the weekend, after Department of Homeland Security head Tom Homan mocked an ABC reporter for raising a question about the due process protections that are part of U.S. immigration law, I reached out to the lawyer and scholar whose legal knowledge and intellect I respect most. I asked William A. Preston for his opinion on the implications of the illegal migrants’ denial of due process.

He responded with the following five aphoristic text messages: “The absence of due process for people deported by the Republican administration to this supermax slave-labor prison means no one knows for sure what their [these prisoners’] status is—they could be U.S. citizens for all we (and the court before whom this is being litigated by the ACLU) know—or why they really are being deported and whether any of this could even properly be upheld as lawful.”

“These are 5th Amendment basics: Deprivation of liberty without due process of law.”

“If no due process exists, nothing stops the Republican administration from deporting U.S. citizens who criticize Israel or would oppose a U.S. war with Iran to this supermax slave-labor prison in El Salvador.”

“The excuses put forward in court by DoJ [Department of Justice] would justify this.”

“The 5th Amendment says no person shall be deprived of due process. It doesn’t only apply to citizens or green card holders.

DoJ’s response is, ‘Trust me bro, they’re illegal.’”

In other words, Tren de Aragua today and perhaps garden-variety cranks and critics like me tomorrow. Unlike the Neocon apostates and fallen Neoliberals who rolled like jailhouse snitches when it mattered (9/11, torture, Iraq invasion, tech censorship, COVID, BLM riots, illegal immigration, fealty to China, Mexico and China’s Opiate War, criminal catch and release programs, men playing women’s sports, Israel’s war crimes, the doomed Ukrainians, etc.) during both Republican and Democratic administrations, I have spoken out about what I believe is wrong and never made an ideological 180.

For writing critically about Bush’s Global War on Terror, I was called “naïve” and placed on a “watch list.” When I criticized Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power for expanding Bush’s War on Terror, I was called “sexist” and a “nascent MAGA supporter.” For questioning BLM’s shadowy leadership and dubious funding, you guessed it, “racist.” For questioning the discredited Steele Dossier, Russiagate, and the political objectives of the Ukraine War, I was labelled a “Putinista,” then hacked and deplatformed.

Last year, when I pointed out the obvious—President Biden would not make it to election day and Kamala was unelectable—I was called a Trump supporter again. The only problem with these indictments of me was that not one of them was true.

The Trump administration has replaced the midwit progressive Wokesters with midwit conservative Wokesters. They are opposite sides of the same idiotic binary coin that has crippled America. The Trump administration’s amateur hour, Signal pratfall has left me with as little faith in Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, Homan, and Miller as I have in Obama, Clinton, Panetta, Holder, Power, Biden, Blinken, Austin, Garland, Mayorkas, Sunstein, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Chertoff.

I had fun for about a week watching Trump’s Crony Capitalist Cadres rout the Corporate Cultural Revolutionaries. In such a short time, the emotional blackmail strategies that worked so well during the Biden administration were fully revealed to be blank ammunition. The shrill cries of “fascist,” “racist,” “transphobe,” “Nazi,” “oligarch,” and “white supremacist,” now fall on deaf ears. Their overuse has turned these words into stale, meaningless clichés. However, after the initial wave of schadenfreude passed, I wondered where this leaves America as a nation.

Will we ever be able to transcend the dead end “better than Biden/better than Trump” binary?

Orange Caligula’s theatrical bluster cannot hide the reality that not since the 1860s has America been more divided or looked weaker on the international stage. Under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, the U.S. military lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen and, most recently, Ukraine. More importantly, at least to the Trump administration, Israel, the tiny nation that we have built our foreign policy around for the past quarter century, has never been more despised, isolated, and insecure. As President Volodymyr Zelensky can attest, with friends like Trump, you don’t need enemies.

“We are falling into the trap of imitating the ‘evildoing’ which we accuse our enemies of initiating,” wrote Rich Arant who was a contract interrogator who worked at Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force base in 2003–4. He had a revelation one night after questioning a former Afghan Mujahid who had fought against the Soviets and was now in jail because a paid U.S. government informant and well-known Soviet collaborator had fingered him. The man broke down in tears and after he composed himself, he said, “I fought Russians, our common enemy, and now you Americans have imprisoned me on the word of a son of the Russians. This is my reward.”

Arant quit shortly thereafter and offered this observation: “‘Precautionary murder’ is the term once used by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Former conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners are now considered quaint, obsolete. But a prisoner is as defenseless as a passenger held hostage on an aircraft. There is little honor found in exploiting his fears, no matter how pressing the requirement.” Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, one of the few brave enough to push back against the Bush administration, put it best, “When you put together the pieces, it’s all so sad. To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values.”

The Trump administration would be wise to consider the words of American Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson’s now famous opening address at those trials: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants the poison chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

Like the Bush administration’s decision to deem War on Terror prisoners “illegal enemy combatants,” then torture and warehouse them in offshore dungeons, the Trump administration’s performative deportations are already blowing back, and costing political capital. Deport all the illegal criminal migrants you want, but respect the Constitution.

Justice Roberts put it best: “Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics…. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

Now, it is up to America’s other two branches of government to rein in Orange Caligua.

If they can’t, our democratic experiment and our “shining hill on the city” and “American exceptionalism” conceits will be exposed as just that.

More overpriced, “6th generation” fighter planes can’t save us and the United States will be the latest overstretched empire to fall.

(Editor’s note: Peter Maguire is a surfer, war crimes investigator and author ofThai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (movie rights optioned by Kelly Slater), Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, Breathe, the  bio on jiujitsu icon Rickson Gracie and its follow up Comfort in Darkness. Ain’t much ol Petey can’t do. This story first appeared on Pete’s substack Sour Milk, subscribe, it’s free etc.)