Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Aswin “Swin” Suebsaeng: I wish it were under brighter circumstances, but it is always a pleasure to be on the pod with you, Greg.
Kaitlan Collins (audio voiceover): You said that if the Supreme Court said someone needed to be returned, you would abide by that. You said that on Air Force One just a few days ago. And they said it must be facilitated.
Sargent: Swin, there you have it. Trump says Abrego Garcia is a criminal, even though he was never charged with any crime and his deportation was canceled by a judge. And therefore Trump won’t follow the Supreme Court. Your thoughts?
Sargent: Well, in the same meeting, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the following about whether Abrego Garcia will be returned, “It’s up to El Salvador if they want him returned.” Swin, this is just pure bullshit. The Trump administration can simply ask Bukele to turn him over so that the U.S. government can follow the ruling of our highest court, which is, again, that it facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. So where are we now with the chief law enforcement officer on the U.S. basically saying, We don’t have to do this. This is on the dictator of El Salvador to decide?
Among the reasons they’re refusing to do that is—it’s a very cosmetic and very stupid one, but it’s one that runs deeply through the veins of the Republican Party right now, especially the Trumpified Republican Party—they really, really, really do not want to give the “media” a win on this. They don’t want to give people like you and me a win. They don’t want to give us a scalp by retreating on this. Donald Trump’s view and Stephen Miller’s view and J.D. Vance’s view and all of their views would be precisely that.
And another part of it has to do with optics in their full-blown propaganda campaign. As much as they love to deport and rendition and remove and keep people out, a very effective tool with the second Trump administration is the propaganda war that they’re fighting that either scares people from trying to come to the U.S. or scares people who are undocumented—or even if they are documented but don’t necessarily have the exact status that a Trump or a JD Vance would “value”—from wanting to stay.
Sargent: Well, here’s where Bukele comes in. Bukele, who has clearly been enlisted by the Trump administration to help Trump get away with what you’re talking about, was asked in this meeting if he will return Abrego Garcia. Listen to this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): So you could release him inside of El Salvador.
Trump (audio voiceover): Well, they’d love to have a criminal ...
Trump (audio voiceover): They would love it. Yeah, they’re sick. These are sick people.
Suebsaeng: Yeah. And beyond it being fascistic and as if some deranged online anime Nazi were making federal policy in most ad hoc way possible—and I mean this as blistering a negative remark as I hope it’s coming across to your audience—one of the worst things I can say about these first few months of the second Trump era is that it really does remind me in the marrow of my bones of what it felt like to live through the very worst abuses and excesses of the George W. Bush war on terror period. What I mean by that is when President Bush and his gang were doing all kinds of things like torture and war crimes, little goodies like that, for the most part—not entirely, but mostly—they tried to hide it a little bit. George Bush would go out there and say to the cameras, Mark my words, or something like that. America doesn’t torture. I do not torture. And of course, it was just complete fabrication lies. Of course he was.
Sargent: That is exactly what it’s like. And I think the one of the big takeaways from this meeting is you could visibly see Trump feeling really, really empowered by the mere fact that he was sitting next to a fellow authoritarian. The whole thing was really grotesque and really, really unsettling in a profound way. Trump was coming into his own as a far-right authoritarian and fascistic leader before our eyes in this meeting.
Sargent: Right. And Swin, he was pissing all over the press in front of Bukele as if to say, See, I can knock around mind media just like you can knock around your opposition.
Sargent: Yeah, he’s essentially saying, Look, I’m aligned with them, not with liberal democracies anymore. In fact, at one point, Trump also strongly suggested he wants to start sending criminals who are U.S. citizens to El Salvador as well. Listen to this.
Sargent: Swin, as we know, Trump gets to say who is a criminal and who is not by fiat. This is more or less what his own people said at this meeting. So I still have a little bit of a tough time envisioning them rounding up U.S. citizens and sending them off to a foreign gulag, but what do you think? Where does this leave us? Do we really think he’ll get around to trying that?
This is something that not only our anonymous sources within the administration have been telling us is going on and is being taken seriously—again, with the caveat of whether they actually are able to pull it off or not; at this point, I think we have to take them very, very, very seriously about their efforts—but it was also described to us on the record by Mike Davis, who is, of course, a very close Trump ally. [He] still communicates privately and personally with Donald Trump, and is very mobbed up and highly respected as a MAGA legal mind among not just the Republican Trumpist elite but the West Wing and Trump administration brass. And he just told us on the record, This is my position. This is what I would want President Trump to do. And while he was a little bit cute about it and said, I’m not going to get into the finer details about my private conversations with Trump or anybody in his inner circle, but I can tell you that they take my private counsel very seriously.
Suebsaeng: He was specifically talking about “pro-Hamas” individuals who are naturalized American citizens—and have the heavy quotation marks on “pro-Hamas” because the Trump administration’s definition of “pro-Hamas” is resoundingly different than your own mind. Basically, if they’ve been naturalized within the past several years, to strip them of their citizenship, accuse them of lying on their citizenship form, and then, in his words, to get them the hell out of our country. So it’s basically a recipe for taking away your citizenship due to things including but not limited to thought crime, as according to MAGA and Donald Trump. And I almost said “deporting you,” which I guess technically would be, but really what it would be doing is kidnapping you and taking you outside of America’s borders. This is horrifying stuff. They keep talking about it both behind the scenes and in front of the scenes. And it is not good. I do not care for it.
Suebsaeng: I don’t want to make this sound like a dodge, but I would actually argue to you that it’s been less than three months and baby, we’re already there. It is significantly worse than even I [expected]—and I had a piss poor opinion of Donald Trump going into his second presidency. It is beneath the floor and beneath the lowly set bar that even someone like I had it at.
There is no way that that wouldn’t be resoundingly said across the board. And we just have to live up to the fact that we are currently choking really hard on that reality that, I’m sorry, it has happened here. And it’s only three months in, so I can only see it getting worse.
Suebsaeng: Anytime, dude.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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