By refusing to even countenance the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from a Salvadorian concentration camp, the Trump regime is testing norms and boundaries; but more than that, it is signaling how it expects to shape the future, and the White House’s tweet on X this week only reinforced that.
“Oh, and by the way,” the regime informed Senator Chris Van Holland (D-MD) “he’s not coming back.” The text accompanied an annotated image of a New York Times article from the previous day for emphasis.
The image itself was revealing. With simulated red ink, it offered edits for the Times’ headline” “Senator Meets With Wrongly Maryland Man in El Salvador,” by crossing out “Wrongly” and changing “Maryland Man” to “MS-13 illegal alien,” and adding “who’s never coming back.”
It was an audacious redaction of the Times’ otherwise anodyne and factual headline, transforming it into a petulant taunt.
Abrego Garcia had, in fact, been “wrongly deported;” that is a matter of established fact acknowledged by the regime. He has had a ‘”withholding of removal” status granted by a federal judge since 2019, and is legally permitted to live and work in the United States (despite the irregularity of the conditions of his immigration). A federal court ruled that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was thus illegal and it ordered the regime to expedite his return to the United States. A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the guys who deported Abrego Garcia) acknowledged that it had made a “mistake” due to an “administrative error.”
It should have ended there with Abrego Garcia’s immediate repatriation. It didn’t, of course, and that, in itself, is deeply troubling. Abrego Garcia’s rights – even immigrants have rights, whatever President Trump might think – have been rudely trampled. And hundreds of others, whatever their legal statuses, have been deported to a foreign concentration camp without even the pretense of due process. This is the kind of thing that makes any foreigner in the United States (like me) break out in a cold sweat. Together with the detention and possible deportation of Mahmoud Khalil (and, it should be noted, others) I am finding it hard to sleep at night.
That tweet from the White House only underlined the smug, truculent cruelty of the situation. One can almost hear gales of laughter from the snot-nosed adolescent in the Oval office, and his enablers: “nyah, nyah, can’t make me!”
Indeed, neither Sen. Van Holland, nor Congress (even assuming it was so inclined), nor the media, nor the American people President Trump return Abrego Garcia to his home and family. Justice, rights, the law: these are impotent in the face of the regime’s power (or so it assumes), and the tweet was meant to make that absolutely clear.
Nothing can be more ominous than an innocent man torn from his home and. family by unrestrained, arbitrary power. Except maybe this: The regime knows that it ls lying and it knows that we know it is lying. It knows that Abrego Garcia has rights and there is no conclusive evidence that he is, nor ever was, a member of MS-13. But it simply does not care because it believes that it can shape reality, memory, and history to its own ends.
Like the functionaries in George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the regime regards “reality” and “truth” as infinitely malleable resources to be reconfigured as necessary; indeed, they should be reshaped as a demonstration of its nigh unlimited power. This is a chilling thought because it means that MAGA clearly intends to control reality forever.
This is the great goal of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt warned in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the totalitarian regime’s “extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man to fabricate it.” This, Arendt noted, reveals the full breadth of the regime’s ambitions: the “ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.” The regime might not aspire to rule the world, so much as to completely dominate the Americans’ realities.
The White House tweet ridiculed the New York Times’ factual reporting — and facts themselves. It contemptuously rewrote the headline to report, from the bully pulpit of the free press, to match its favored reality, because it could. And it did so to make a point and to remind those of naïve enough to believe in “reality” that it thinks we’re suckers… And to serve notice that Abrego Garcia is “never coming back,” rights, justice, and law be damned.