Poor in what sense? Morally? Quite possibly. But the argument here, which I can’t disagree with, is that the end result - getting rid of Trump - needs to be the focus. And agree or not, not enough of the country gives a shit about Abrego Garcia compared to destructive tariffs.
That average spread covers one and a half months of polls. The most recent polls all show him underwater on immigration. The fact is that Trump is already losing on the economy, and focusing on immigration has been successfully eroding support on his biggest issue. I don't think it really matters which fight Trump wants because Trump is extremely incompetent and wants all kinds of fights he will not win.
If you want to actually achieve something and not simply engage in self-congratulatory moral posturing - the inflation and nikes being expensive is where the political win is
Or you can follow the standard Lefty Purity Pony path over the decades and engage in the moral posturing and pat yourself on the back about the correct moral choice as Trump erodes away.
This utterly cynical attitude that having principles is cringe, nobody really believes in anything and that all that matters is triangulating to win the media cycle for the day is a total fucking cancer on politics.
Having principles you genuinely believe in and being willing to stand up for them is Good, Actually.
The Moral Superiority Posturing of the Leftist Fringes is self-indulgent own-back-patting - of course the statement above is a fine example of a series of logical fallacies - itself a red herring based on the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle as of course crafting winning coalitions and compromise does not at all mean believing in nothing - while hand waiving about media of course is nothing more than a red herring to avoid admission one has failed to win over voters, the point of democracy. But rigidi idelodogues of all sides never can see that.
I suppose it will never change, the posturing of the 1930s onwards.
Actually winning elections and actually achieving things rather than self-congratulatory posturing while not actually achieving anything is nothing more than self-righteous self-indulgence that in fact as we are seeing now brings actual broad harms.
No one cares what your sensibilities are though dude. Americans live here, in the US, with their Nikes - not in El Salvador or in some resistance encampment for your pet political issue. Educated liberals can grandstand all they want, but when citizens have to buy their kids new shoes, they're going to vote on that and leave your ideals in the bin.
Romero is Venezuelan. A lot of people are saying he's from the gang known as Tren de Aragua.
"Jurisdiction" or "standing" aren't exactly the right terms. If you believe in realpolitik, other countries can do what they want, it's just a question of what we do about it.
But no, there aren't any treaties or anything that would let us compel another country to send back a third country's citizen we deported there, though we could certainly ask, bribe, threaten, beg, or cajole them. Trump's agreement with El Salvador does not have a "takebacks" clause.
""Jurisdiction" or "standing" aren't exactly the right terms. If you believe in realpolitik, other countries can do what they want, it's just a question of what we do about it."
Well, the problem is that a US court can hold the government liable for improper procedures in deporting someone, but it's not like the courts have force of law to get them back.
I don't see the problem, but yes, that's the idea. The courts have limited power in telling the president how to deal with foreign countries. And of course they have no power over foreign countries directly.
It was clever of the Trump admin to do things that way when dealing with hostile courts.
It's not even really clear how the court could "hold the government liable." What does that mean?
Essentially every single member of the Democratic Party, with a straight face, told the American people that an 81 year old man with a 38% approval rating was our best defense against fascists.
When authoritarians rise to power, their ascent can be linked not only to their own political savvy, but ALSO the ineptitude of their opposition.
None of the individuals currently railing against Trump (Pritzker, Newsome, Booker, even Bernie/AOC) have a shred of credibility, because they ALL toed the party line on Biden’s re-nomination. For all the Dems’ handwringing about how “history is repeating itself” in Trump’s ascent to power, I’ve yet to see a single major Democratic figure hold a big fat shiny mirror up to themselves and acknowledge their own egregious mistakes in the 2024 election. Unless and until that happens - or unless an outsider who DIDN’T toe that line appears - the Democratic Party will continue to be undercut as the feckless idiots who put us here to begin with.
Tariffs are not a binary issue. They're a complex policy question. One can support some tariff proposals but not others, especially since the tariffs have changed a few times recently.
They really, really are a complex policy question. Please read a little more about pro-tariff arguments. Even Krugman has written about situations where he supports them.
They're not always bad economics. We have a trade imbalance that needs to be dealt with somehow.
I am a professional economist, I don't need to read innumerate nonsense written by isolationsists and ex-socialist Peronist types about tarriffs.
There is absolutely no problem with the US good trade deficit - what there is a problem with is US productive investment in infrastructure and enalbing of competitive enterprises.
Economic literacy, not failed quasi-Socialist models that Latin America already spent decades showing are economic illteracy and emo-nationalist nonsense.
I honestly think equating the two positions is incredibly reductive and is only motivated by the lack of any ability to form a coherent defence of Trump's absurd trrif process, quantity, and rollout.
Democrats can most certainly still approve of the use of tarrifs, and opposed this fiasco on principal grounds rather than partisanship thenor as there's no evidence to support any of the claims of the Trump administration. Republicans, on the other hand, have championed the reduction and elimination of tariffs, starting with Nixon and up through NAFTa and the TPP.
Clinton signed NAFTA into law. Both sides are being inconsistent with their principles, but Dems are correct to violate theirs. Outside of politics, there is no reason for tariffs.
Let's be real here, you're not fooling anyone with cherry picking singular details out of a long story in attempt to revise history. It was a cornerstone of the Reagan campaign that was largely negotiated by the Bush administration, and while Clinton signed it many Democrats in Congress didn't vote for it. Which really rest my case the I made. Democrats aren't, and haven't been, wholly for or against tarrifs.
Supporting or not supporting tariffs is also not a clear cut issue. Tariffs can be helpful if targeted to specific industries and products and have a clear strategy. The point of trumps tariffs is also nuanced. Are they a negotiating strategy? He hasn’t made any deals yet and in fact, China seems to have the upper hand now instead of being isolated. Bring back manufacturing? What kind of manufacturing? Why put tariffs on all goods? Will this lower prices of goods? Will Americans be laid off from high paying jobs and now working in factories? Why do you support increasing taxes on American consumers. Everything about Trump requires discussion bc he says short catchy statements and presents them as fact bc he has no integrity and doesn’t care if they are true or not.
The US needs to boost productive investment not "bring manufacturing" back - especially driven by economically illiterate nostalgia over an idealised memory of the 1960s.
The industrial on-shoring strtegy needs economic competitiveness.
Trump reruning Brazilian, Argetinian LatAm Liberational anti-capitalist trade policy is doing nothing but dressing up quais Maoist politics in thread-bear populist closing to dupe the Rubes.
And the US is not "at war" with any particular country at this moment. In competition certainly but not at war.
US economic competitiveness would be based on Literal economic policy - including automation of ports, permitting streamling, process streamlining (had Trump pursued these he would have done real good to cut genuine red tape), long-term industrial asset investment incentives and above all energy infrastructure - hard infrastructure (grids, generation) for lower non-volatile
The Biden Admin's chip initiative had the right top line ideas (as one can see from actual private investment that it triggered) but like other Biden things, allowed to bog down in red-tape and wokey nonsense and lefty nonsense on making everything union (nothing against including some modest carrots for unions but no fan of labor unions).
I agree it's probably not a clear-cut issue, but I'm not sure it matters.
The stock market reaction to the tariff plan did cut through the noise, and it did impact the retirement of millions of Americans.
I'm also suspicious of the claim that everything about Trump requires discussion. Democrats don't need to explain the nuances of their tariff plan, just like Trump doesn't necessarily need to explain what his plan even is.
If a buck counts for less next year, and it counts for even less the year after that, that's the entire argument. It doesn't even matter if tariffs didn't cause it. Democrats can say Trump shouldn't have tariffed at all, should have tariffed differently, that God has punished America for electing him, or that Trump's simply a moron.
The only reason many Americans accept all of the constant nonsense from Trump is that they think his assholery and braggadocio will improve the average American's position. Making trade deals, stopping illegal immigration, halting America's involvement in foreign wars. The core of the Trump case is that this will bring prosperity. If it doesn't, people are going to wonder why they accepted all of the stupid stuff about him.
They are helpful in securing the support of relatively fungible working class voters without broader economic harms. At best, they are politically expedient. They are not helpful.
There weren't any "fascists" on the ballot. That kind of nonsense is why the Democrats lost.
To win, the Democrats need to moderate, and they need to start acknowledging that there are complex policy questions that the right has a valid point of view on, even if they disagree. Right now they're the dogmatic party that thinks the other side is evil fascists. That is not a winning message.
I agree with you. My point is, THEY claimed we were facing down fascists, and then in the same breath told us that Joe Biden, whom 80% of voters thought too old for the job, was our best option for fighting said fascists. If they believed that, they’re too dumb to run the country, and if they DIDN’T believe it, they’re too obsequious. Neither of those is a good look for a political party. Ps I personally reached out multiple times to my own elected representatives, and prominent senators/reps from other states, AND Obama, asking why no one was even calling for debates/a true primary, and NO ONE responded. So color me resentful, yeah.
I think it’s more about the *lessons* they should learn from it than anything. Nobody will care about whether or not Biden was fit to run for re-election in 2027/28 during the next election season
I’m sorry reading this made me a lil angry. This shit doesn’t deserve the same consultant strategizing as how Dems should hit the sweet spot on trans issues to win back moderate voters in swing states. See who’s making the maximum noise about these deportations, it’s civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald, not immigrant rights activists.
This is about whether Trump admin can admit it was a mistake to send him to a foreign gulag and then feign helplessness when asked if the client state we are paying to house him can returned him so we can see his case in court and put him on a deportation proceeding to a country other than El Salvador if need be.
This is very reminiscent of Bush trying to send Muslims with alleged far fetched “terrorist” connections to Gitmo to be tortured because if in America, they would have to provide evidence and they didn’t really have any. The vibe after 9/11 was intense and it WASN’T popular to put any restraint on the president to prosecute alleged “terrorists”. It was tough because though the people Bush was sending to Gitmo weren’t terrorists, they probably weren’t the most sympathetic cases either. But it was one of the most shameful things America engaged in. I wish more politicians and elites had pushed back against it even if it would have cost them the election. That courage was very rare at the time. Not pushing back against Bush allowed the precedent to be set that Trump is now exploiting: that people who we suspect of nefarious links but can’t prove in court can be sent to foreign chambers to take care of it.
Eventually, no pushback against the mass hysteria post 9/11 led to one of the biggest American disasters of the 21st century manifesting in the Iraq War.
Glenn Greenwald isn't a leftie, is he? I know Hanania and Andrew Sullivan aren't. I don't know who has been writing all of the National Review articles condemning the administration's handling of Abrego Garcia's case, but someone has and given it's the National Review, they're conservative.
This case, and (to a lesser extent) the Khalil case cut across left-right lines. There are real concerns about ascendant authoritarianism, suppression of freedom of speech, and defeat of due process being articulated by people whose support of Trump was previously driven by Trump's opposition to DEI.
But yeah, that still doesn't mean it's a useful issue. My guess is that this libertarian group is pretty small.
It's just crushingly depressing that people across the political spectrum can look at what Trump's doing and uniformly agree it's trashing the 5th amendment... But Nate can come along and quite convincingly argue that it doesn't matter because shoe prices.
Nate may be right, but I'm worried about the next authoritarian already, because they'll have better economic policies than Trump. Is that really all it takes to gut our rights? I used to assume people cared more than this.
But the red herring of others iconoclosts upset about this doesn't mean anything if the wider population doesn't move. Eggheadism and as Silver puts it the Great Cope in engaging in magical thinking thta if one just explain a bit more the Unwashed Masses will be converted is a path to losing.
Whining about the fialures of human kind morality is self-defeatism.
I do personally wish that this case got people upset - it upserts me but it does not move wider population which is in the throws of anti-immigrant reaction.
I mostly agree with this, but I have to emphasize that there really does need to be work on the "wider population" in the background. A populace that cares only about its immediate prosperity is not capable of sustaining civil liberties in the long term.
There is such a thing as a permission structure, and I think we can expect them to continue to be created on the right with respect to these issues.
More broadly, public opinion isn't immovable. It does respond to what political elites say. This is how you end up with a substantial portion of Republicans sanguine about abandoning Ukraine, for instance.
I'm not saying Democrats or left-leaning media should rely on the Abrego Garcia case to win in 2026 or 2028. That's a shorter term issue, and Nate's right that stuff like tariffs should be the focus. I'm saying we, as a self-governing society, cannot long endure if we remain indifferent to civil liberties.
as a civil libertarian who is very happy with Trump and this case, I don't understand the issue. This guy is an illegal. He has no right to be in this country. He had a deportation order. Yes, he got deported to El Salvador instead of Guatemala, which was a mistake. No, there's nothing that can be done about it now. But there weren't any due process violations here. This just isn't a civil liberties issue.
Ya I’m willing to admit that imo it’s worth losing elections in order to make a fuss about this. I would’ve been ok with a narrow republican election win back in 2000s if Dems opposed Iraq more fervently. What made Iraq and War on Terror so pernicious was the bipartisan stamp of approval where dissenters started to question their sanity. Electeds are in Congress for a reason, what’s the point of having political capital if u are not willing to burn it to prevent an authoritarian precedent to be set.
Would generally agree with this except on certain issues. For example, imo in hindsight if Iraq was more polarized with more Democratic dissenters at the time, Bush would have not been allowed such a long leash to carry out that stupidity. It is hard to overstate how essential the bipartisan sheen from centrist liberal publications was to selling Iraq to the public and for it to be allowed to linger for so long. Maybe Dems would have still lost moderate voters and lost the election but polarizing that issue would’ve cut Bush’s zeal since they are still around 30% committed libs in this country. It is always the equation of how much you value the issue multiplied by the risk that it would be electorally bad exponentially to the power of whether losing the election this cycle would even be bad for your political project. It is simply not obvious to me whether Trump winning in 2020 would’ve been good or bad from a left wing perspective. Political parties win or lose elections thermostatically and power changes hands every couple of years. These things are hard to do game theory around.
Matt Bruenig did a post that I broadly agree with explaining the dysfunctional coalition dynamics that lead to this “moral posturing” or what I what call the further left faction within Dem coalition trying to exert their power: https://mattbruenig.com/2023/10/26/dysfunctional-coalition-politics/
So I'm a civil libertarian who is very happy with Trump and this case, and I don't understand the issue. This guy is an illegal. He has no right to be in this country. He had a deportation order.
Yes, he got deported to El Salvador instead of Guatemala, which was a mistake. No, there's nothing that can be done about it now. But there weren't any due process violations here. This just isn't a civil liberties issue.
Nonsense, there is a reason we don’t live in a purely majoritarian country where our rights can be taken away if more than 50% of the country agrees with it.
Think that's a reference to the campus idiots, whom even the Dems are smart enough not to defend. But yeah, kinda overshooting the runway for the purposes of this conversation.
Ah I see, thanks for the clarifying comment. JC is referring to the notorious campus protestors with their slogans like "stop the bombing" and "ceasefire now" but with their real secret agenda of mass murder.
It is worth thinking about historical analogies here. Your argument boils down to: Garcia is Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks hasn't come along yet, or isn't well enough known yet. Fine, maybe they should talk more about Andry or one of the other kidnapped people instead.
But here's another analogic question. If you were a German Social Democrat in the early 1930s, would you have deliberately refrained from calling out Hitler's evil lies about Jews because other issues were more favorable to you?
One depressing thing I am trying to convey with that analogy is that, if American voters cannot be convinced that the rule of law and due process actually matter, American democracy may be doomed regardless of Democratic Party messaging strategy.
Many people spoke out about Hitler's lies. The issue with Germany was that even pre-Hitler, German courts were a joke, the congress was deadlocked and incompetent, hyperinflation ran rampant. There really were greedy businessmen taking advantage of the chaos (just not the Jews as it happened).
If (...) I thought today was similar to Weimar Germany, I would be trying to lower government spending after COVID to fight inflation, pulling out reserves to keep fuel prices down, passing sensible anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement (Biden actually did do this), drawing down executive power and empowering the courts, wind down Ukraine either with a coalition force or by turning it over to Europe the way Trump is doing (poorly), forcing my side of congress to reform regulations like corrupt licensing practices that keeps goods out of American stores, housing reform, upzoning, etc., actually do something about the immigration crisis (this actually is the executive's job for once, we already have laws on the books).
Biden half-assed half of this and no-assed the rest of it and now we're lapping up the crap left over.
Oh, and here's a closer and more recent practical analogy. If you were a California Democratic strategist in the mid-1990s, would you have advised state-level Democrats to drop their opposition to Prop 187 and stop trying to persuade CA voters to be more pro-immigrant?
The economic impacts aren't going to need Dems to stand up and yell about; they're going to be obvious soon enough and so will the cause. The best thing they can probably do is stay out of the way.
The due process fight, on the other hand, not only does need to be explained, but is going to make those fighting for it look wiser and wiser as those more media-friendly victims start to appear. There's political risk in crying wolf, but a payoff when the wolves actually show up.
The whole point of the story of the boy who cried wolf is that it is harmful to the crier precisely at the point when the wolves show up.
If you acclimate voters to the idea that Democrats lie constantly about spurious “threats to democracy”, then if there ever really is a threat to democracy all you've achieved is to guarantee that voters will ignore Democrats' broken-clock warnings.
The fact that anyone thinks the current situation maps onto The Boy Who Cried Wolf is silly. Everyone who's confused by what I just said should go read the story. For what it's worth, broken-clock is closer.
The current behavior of the administration regarding Abrego Garcia's case really is a narrow nullification of the 5th Amendment. The administration has made clear it's going to "look at the law" to see if American citizens could also be sent to El Salvador's prisons. If such a thing ever came to pass, it would at least be a nullification of the 8th Amendment as well.
These are threats to democracy. Every time the Trump administration (or any administration) pulls a move like this, they're weakening the dedication of our political class and our electorate to principles that were laid out over 200 years ago by men who basically spent their entire lives trying to figure out how to avoid tyranny. I think many would agree that their system has worked pretty well, with some major and plenty of minor exceptions. And those who don't agree should at least acknowledge that one of those principles is actually being broken, or we're not even pretending to be coupled to a Constitution anymore.
Instead of recognizing these obvious facts, some are saying "call me when it's The Night of the Long Knives". Brain death. Tyranny, unless done by a complete idiot, creeps slowly. But the steps are noticeable.
The government made a mistake and committed an illegal act when it deported Abrego Garcia. It acknowledges that it was a mistake, and that it was illegal. Every court that has seen the case has indicated that the government's actions defeated Abrego Garcia's due process rights. And every court has indicated a clear remedy (returning him), regardless of their ability to compel the President to get that remedy. The administration has, to the extent it was ordered to do anything, refused to carry out the order in good faith. But I think more importantly, it has refused to use its leverage to obtain that remedy. Just because you can't be compelled to support and defend the Constitution doesn't mean you shouldn't support and defend the Constitution.
Some have pointed out that this defiance has precedents (of a kind) under previous administrations, and they'd be right, but that's only half the story. The other half is what happens 1 or 2 or 10 years from now (under President Vance OR President AOC) if everyone pretends the current events are business as usual.
Every court has not indicated the "clear remedy" of returning him. You don't understand the issue here.
The issue here is that "returning him" is not something the administration can do. The matter is out of the Trump administration's hands. The scumbag in question is in El Salvador subject to a foreign government. No US court can order a foreign government to do something.
Nor can a court order the administration to "use its leverage" to compel a foreign country to do something. That would be interfering in foreign policy. That raises some serious issues and no court is going to do that. It would violate separation of powers. Anyone who supports and defends the Constitution should agree that no court can order a president to use leverage against a foreign country.
And that's really the important and fundamental question here: How much control should courts have over foreign policy?
Yes, every court has indicated that the remedy is for Abrego Garcia to be returned. Read the opinions. This is not in serious dispute. That said, it's not to be confused with the question of whether the courts can compel the Trump administration to use Presidential powers to return him. They can't.
"The issue here is that "returning him" is not something the administration can do. The matter is out of the Trump administration's hands. The scumbag in question is in El Salvador subject to a foreign government. No US court can order a foreign government to do something."
In order: False, false, debatable, and true. The USA has leverage in a million ways over El Salvador. Of course, it need use none of them, because Trump could politely ask Bukele to return Abrego Garcia, and the man would be back in the US in less than 24 hours. These men are on very good terms. It's clear that Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador's custody, but he's there at the behest of the US government. The exact legal nature of Abrego Garcia's detention is not well understood, because the Trump Administration has argued, in court, that the agreement under which Abrego Garcia is being held is classified (this is the part where real civil libertarians reach for their guns). What we do know is that the Trump administration is paying for Abrego Garcia's detention, along with the detention of the other deportees. It's not clear what, if any, relationship there is between Abrego Garcia's detention and any proceedings of the Salvadoran justice system.
All of this said, it's worth emphasizing that a court can't compel a President to do any kind of foreign policy, and that this is a good thing. I'm sure there are people arguing that they should be able to compel the President, and those people are wrong. That would largely, if not totally, defeat the point of the Executive. As important as this is to understand, it really is beside the point.
"Nor can a court order the administration to "use its leverage" to compel a foreign country to do something. That would be interfering in foreign policy. That raises some serious issues and no court is going to do that. It would violate separation of powers. Anyone who supports and defends the Constitution should agree that no court can order a president to use leverage against a foreign country."
We're in agreement. All true. All beside the point.
"And that's really the important and fundamental question here: How much control should courts have over foreign policy?"
It's not the fundamental question. I know this because I expect your answer to this question is "none", which is the same as my answer to the question. And if you read my comment carefully, you would notice that this isn't inconsistent with my position.
My position is:
1. Abrego Garcia's due process rights were violated, at least because of the violation of the withholding of removal order (which, in the administration's defense, was a mistake).
2. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have indicated the remedy for the violation of Abrego Garcia's rights, and that remedy is to return him.
3. The administration is obviously uninterested in obtaining that remedy, and refuses to lift a finger to obtain that remedy.
The courts' ability to compel the President to do anything in terms of foreign policy isn't implicated here. The President's oath to "support and defend the Constitution", and his Constitutional obligation to "take care that the Laws be faithfully executed" are implicated. The President is not making anything close to a good faith effort to support and defend the Constitutional rights of Abrego Garcia, nor to undo his administration's violation of the law. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you care about the Constitution.
I think Nate's point is simply that Dems' constant talk of the Garcia case is biting into the tariffs' "mind-share".
So maybe the tariffs don't need Dems to talk about them, but then the Dems should simply shut up and let the tariffs dominate the conversation. That might even be preferable to having the Dems talking about the tarrifs, which would help keep the tariff talk non-partisan.
Yes, attention is a limited resource. So are news cycles.
Trump is winning the rope-a-dope game by getting the Dems to focus on how he's too tough on deporting illegal gang members, which makes him look great and hurts the Dems. He got the Dems to make his case for him by constantly screaming how tough he is on immigration.
being tough on immigration and breaking the law/defying the courts/going around the Constitution are vastly different things. Obama deported more people at a higher rate than Trump, while doing it within the confines of the law. This requires framing because Trump says "they are all illegal gang members" when its easily verifiable that this is not the truth.
You're right - progressives did hate on Obama for that which shows that elected Democrats and leftists are not the same.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a withholding of removal status, which allows a person to stay and legally work in the United States. Andry had a pending asylum claim. Those are verifiable by court records. The law allows people to seek asylum and stay in the US with temporary legal status, whether or not you think it should be illegal.
You think its highly questionable he broke the law - Judge Wilkinson, A Reagan appointee on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, sees it differently.
There is nothing wrong with tariffs in a vacuum and they can be useful if implemented strategically. I don’t think anyone in good faith can say this admin has been implementing them strategically.
From a free trade point of view any tariff is a bad idea. What Fain is talking about is de facto protectionism, but he represents a key voting bloc that will probably decide the winner in 2028.
I tend to agree with the net conclusion here, but I'm grappling with a few counterfactuals that might not be directly measurable in polling data:
1 - letting them get away with this without a fight could have more long-term detrimental effects than short-term polling flatlines/dips (e.g. emboldening them to keep pushing the line on what they think they can get away with).
2 - this could be the issue that reawakens the anti-trump movement and mobilizes left-leaning "elites" with disproportionate influence or potential to step up as new voices to lead the party
3 - democratic messaging around "democracy" generally plays straight into every bad stereotype of pompous, out of touch, over-dramatic coastal elite tracy flicks defending institutions that have failed most people. Does grandstanding about threats to democracy poll poorly? Sure. Would real-talk like "what happened innocent until proven guilty?", "if i defied a court order i'd be thrown in jail, why can the oligarchs people running our government get away with it?", "i'm disgusted by how i'm seeing these people treated and i have to speak out for what i believe in" poll poorly? Maybe not?
I'm as into following the data as anyone here, but I sometimes worry it might stifle action and experimentation. I wonder if there's a world where authentically taking a stand on things they care about even if they don't 100% align to polling ends up having a net-positive halo effect for democrats vs the current MO of overly optimized "derisked" talking points.
This right here - if Democrats never stand up for what’s right bc they only want to do what polls well to regain power, then how do they convince people they are better than Trump or Republicans - that helps the “both parties are the same” narrative
Moral imperatives aside, I think talking like real people about things they really care about could help their popularity as well. Think about how many 2024 Trump voters said something like “I don’t like Trump and I don’t agree with him about X, but at least he says what he really feels.”
For sure - the Democracy is a threat narrative didn't land it was abstract and also not currently happening in real time. Listening to the strategists and consultants and using overly intellectual language is a Democratic flaw. However, I will say its difficult to hear when the same people say "Trump tells it like it is" but will also in the same breath say "He's just trolling/joking to rile up the left" (Gaza, Canada, Greenland, third term, etc)
This, exactly. That's a big part of why I voted for him. Whereas Kamala seemed like she was trying to figure out what she should say in response to every question.
Nate - I’m not sure what your complaint is here. The “Democratic Party” isn’t doing anything about either of these things. Most Democrats have been silent about tariffs AND silent about Garcia. Van Hollen went down to El Salvador, but AOC and Schumer didn’t. I wish the party would DO SOMETHING as a start about anything. The media is covering Garcia because it’s a case with a lot of action whereas there isn’t a lot of new economic news every day.
you think Trump is in the right by the defying the courts? The vast majority of people do not support this - several recent polls have shown that even majorities of Republicans think Trump should follow federal court rulings even if he does not agree. This is is not about border security or the moral implications of deporting people. It's about breaking the law and threatening the bedrock principles of being an American.
What the courts told trump to do is a complicated matter. Even if Trump is defying the courts, it's not a clean case and public opinion (and honestly my opinion too) is that someone like Garcia should be deported one way or another, just preferably in a way that doesn't shaft our legal system.
That's a tough line to walk. Like do you see AOC going up and saying "Yes fine we should deport Garcia but bring him back first so he can have a 15 minute hearing and then we'll deport him to a less horrible place"?
Your conclusion that Garcia should be deported even before he has a hearing is based on what? Perhaps we will so conclude after hearing the evidence. However, he appears to have been living a peaceful and productive life since 2019. He has not been arrested for any crimes and has legally been working. The claim that he is a gang member comes from an allegation by Trump and one police officer who said that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and shirt that many gang members wear. Trump tends to make such allegations against many immigrants without citing any evidence and that Bulls hat and shirt observation is laughable. Even if evidence emerges that warrant his deportation that is quite different than sending him to prison for an indefinite term. If the Trump administration has evidence against him they should not fear giving him the hearing that he is entitled to.
I'm curious why you think he's not facilitating the return. What is your evidence that he's not? As the Supreme Court explained, the lower court went too far in trying to command him.
If he made a brief request to El Salvador to return him and they said no, that should be a sufficient attempt at facilitating it.
I mean, it's all part of the mess right? I'm not qualified to determine if simply the act of not asking for him back counts as defiance. But it's pretty clear he hasn't initiated any operation to get him back. We've seen people meet with him, so he's not lost and he's on friendly terms with Bukele who he is directly paying to house Garcia. He could just say, "Give me back that one dude or I won't pay to house him"
The piece makes the mistake of conflating "Democratic Party focus" and "media coverage." I don't see how anyone other than Van Hollen is focused on Garcia at all. In fact, I think the silence from Democratic leadership is notable. The problem is that the Democratic leadership isn't really doing much of ANYTHING. They aren't trying to rally voters around any of the possible issues - they could pick Tariffs, the economy, DOGE, Signalgate, or Garcia. But they haven't done any of that. I do think that the media is very focused on Garcia, but AG Sulzberger is not Chuck Schumer.
Sorry, I don't understand what this means. Are you talking about Nate? He's hardly a media ignoramus. Or was this to me? Presumably not, since I'm just stating the "Indigo Blob" theory / Moldbug's Cathedral and my comment was not about the media, but how the Democratic party acts. In any case, you should explain.
“But part of what you’re counting on me for — and in some cases, even paying me for — is weighing in on high-stakes political controversies even when the response is sure to piss off half the Silver Bulletin reader base.”
I don't think you understand your audience in fullness. What at least a very large segment of your audience counts on you for is for you to not be a pundit, to not engage the kind of speculation we can easily get anywhere else. We (this large segment of your audience) want you to stick to the data and value-neutral horse race discussion, telling us what the results are and how you collected the data. We're not dumb, passive normies: we can make our own judgements for ourselves on how we interpret that data. “Weighing in on high-stakes political controversies” is not only not part of what we count on you for, it actively undermines the integrity of the thing we do count on you for.
Obviously the data journalism is the biggest initial draw, but substack let's the direction go both ways. I like Nate's voice and information especially on sensitive topics precisely because he earned my respect via data journalism.
In that case, couldn't the people who don't want the punditry just not read these articles? Whereas if he doesn't publish them, what would the people who want the punditry do?
There's a huge shortage of punditry written by people of Nate's caliber. Most of it is crap. Nate's is not.
And it cannot possibly undermine the integrity of the data work - this is just an insult to Nate.
That claim does not make any sense. You think he can't have his own views on politics and still do accurate data analysis? You know that he has his own views whether he writes about them or not, so why does writing about them matter?
Nate's punditry has always been absolutely wrong in the past: the most famous time was when he punditted for hours about how it was impossible for Trump to win the nomination, let alone the election. Sigh. Here he goes again, spilling out his white privilege all over the airwaves. Bletch.
Trump broke the law, continues to break the law and threatens to break the law in the future.
But we should ignore it because people think it's okay to send dehumanized immigrants to concentration camps.
Anyone who talks about "white privilege" can safely be disregarded.
I think it's really racist to make an issue of Nate's race, as though you can judge his politicial opinions based on his race. You should apologize for being racist against Nate.
Don't be racist. Racism is wrong.
And regarding Trump, there is no evidence that he broke the law or continues to break it. That's just not true.
I think a lot of my fellow Dems still fail to understand how stories about Trump being a rogue actor uncontrolled by checks and balances actually reinforce a positive opinion of him in some circles.
Many voters opinion of Trump is "He's an asshole, but he's a business man not a politician and is willing to do what it takes to get things done. When stories about how Trump is an asshole disobeying the courts dominate the news, it reinforces both sides of that image (even if you just point out he's an asshole, the idea that he gets things done is inextricably linked to him being an asshole in their minds, so it makes them incorrectly assume he is getting more done). Tariffs were the perfect anti-Trump story because it made it undeniable that he is a fool with no grasp of global markets or the modern world economy. It completely undermined his elevator pitch rather than reinforcing it.
Standing up for people who were lawlessly kidnapped and shipped to a foreign country IS important, so it's not like we shouldn't care, it just shouldn't be the public facing above the fold headline. The headline is Trump is tanking every aspect of the country.
Abrego Garcia was the test case, not bc he’s most the sympathetic figure but bc this is the one where the Trump admin admitted to breaking the law by sending him to El Salvador. He was not in the country illegally at the time of his removal, as he had a form of legal protection. They also are doing nothing to “facilitate” his return, which is an action verb as stated in the 4th Circuit opinion, and posting on social media that he is “never coming back”. They are actively defying a Supreme Court by doing nothing. We don’t always get to pick the fights but the Trump admin ignoring several court orders is a fight we have to have, whether it helps us win the next election or not. Democrats refusing to talk about issues that don’t poll well for them means Republicans get to define it. Thats part of the reason we lost.
Great and where was he sent to? His removal to El Salvador was illegal as the Supreme Court agreed. A withholding of removal status allows you to get a work permit from DHS and work legally in the United States. which Garcia had and checked in with DHS regularly since 2019, including during Trumps first term. A work permit is a form of legal protection. its not the strongest, but it is a form of legal protection. Saying "hes an illegal immigrant" is not accurate.
A work permit from DHS allowed him to work in the US legally at the time of his removal. The only way to revoke that would be to have a judge remove his status. The Supreme Court stated verbatim his removal was illegal. Are you saying you know more than the Supreme Court about US law?
Great, so its irrelevant then because he was in fact deported to El Salvador.
Here's the excerpt from the Supreme Court order:
"The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal."
"For its part, the
Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further
steps."
What steps has the Trump taken to "facilitate" his removal? They are posting on the offical WH account that Garcia is "never coming back." They have admitted to taking no action in court, which shows they have already defied the order by doing nothing and making it clear they will do nothing in good faith.
In your big cope paragraph — you say that Dems believe they will win hearts because when they expose truthful info? Garcia is a perfect example of them trying to score points by lying about facts. He is not only a court-determined MS-13 gang member, he was also held to be deportable at an earlier hearing. This article leaves that due process hearing out. A SECOND due process hearing allowed him to be withheld from going to ONLY El Salvador because he is in fact a gang member who would have been threatened by his RIVAL gang members. The error the Trump Admin made was sending him to El Salvador (his home country where there is no longer a rival gang threat) and not to someplace arbitrary country like Burma, which would have been legally correct. Every single MSM news outlet but Fox — refuses to report these facts. Including that he is a wife beater with 2 orders of protection against him, was investigated by state and Feds for gang activities AND human trafficking. He is the father of only one child and the father of other two has gone on record that he is violent and his 2 children are at risk. But no one knows this because— and I say this as a former 40+. Year Democrat —Democrats Lie. I predicted the Trump win months before this newsletter would admit it. But you all should keep going (and you are not bi-partisan) because Dems will lose again. And again and again. Thank God for that. This fight over Garcia is the perfect reason why they deserved to lose.
"He is not only a court-determined MS-13 gang member, he was also held to be deportable at an earlier hearing"
Misleading. Those were bond hearings in immigration courts. Those courts take the government's claims at face value, and in this case it would require the defendant to demonstrate positively they're not in MS-13, rather than the government to prove their contention beyond a reasonable doubt.
"A SECOND due process hearing allowed him to be withheld from going to ONLY El Salvador because he is in fact a gang member who would have been threatened by his RIVAL gang members."
No. Cut out "is in fact a gang member who" and "his RIVAL" and you're correct. The court's determination that he was in danger from gang members in El Salvador didn't rely on his being in a gang. It had to do with his experience from many years before when he was living in El Salvador as a minor... and was being threatened by gang members.
"The error the Trump Admin made was sending him to El Salvador (his home country where there is no longer a rival gang threat) and not to someplace arbitrary country like Burma, which would have been legally correct."
This is, as far as I know, correct. And given how easy it would be for Trump to bring him back and then immediately deport him somewhere else, the fact that he hasn't done this to comply with the courts should be disturbing.
"Including that he is a wife beater with 2 orders of protection against him"
I know of at least one civil protection order against him, wouldn't be surprised if there were 2.
"was investigated by state and Feds for gang activities AND human trafficking"
Misleading, at best. He wasn't investigated for a crime. Given the clothes he was wearing, his tattoos, and the (dubious) account of an informant, he was suspected of being a gang member. This is what was used against him at his hearings in immigration court.
Human trafficking: in 2022, Abrego Garcia was pulled over in a vehicle with 8 other people. His license was expired. Abrego Garcia said they were traveling for a construction job. Given the fact that he had alleged ties with MS-13 (from the above), and given that there was no luggage in the vehicle, state authorities suspected human trafficking and referred it to ICE. Neither took any further action.
"the father of other two has gone on record that he is violent and his 2 children are at risk"
> "given how easy it would be for Trump to bring him back and then immediately deport him somewhere else, the fact that he hasn't done this to comply with the courts should be disturbing."
Given the fact that he hasn't done that, it would appear that it's not so easy for him to bring him back.
I would assume he grudgingly asked El Salvador for him back, and El Salvador, knowing what Trump actually wanted, said No.
In that situation, there is nothing that the president or courts can do. El Salvador won't release him.
Does the Trump Administration care about men who abuse women? We just invited Conor McGregor, a litigated rapist, to the WH and gave Mel Gibson, a convicted domestic batterer, his guns back. The Trump Admin has proven over and over that they will use abuse of women only when it helps their political narrative. Also ABC News already put out a story about the DV allegations so you are just not being truthful in your statement.
That guy's actually just lying, though. The claims of gang membership had nothing to do with him being granted withholding of removal in the actual deportation proceedings (that stuff about 'rivals' he said) because they were not mentioned in those deportation proceedings - they were exclusively mentioned in the bond proceedings, which have a much lower burden of proof.
He was denied bond because ICE claimed he was a gang member, yes. That isn't proof of fact that he was a gang member, though, any more than someone being denied bond because they're considered a flight risk is proof that they did intend to flee the country, or denying bond to a murder defendant because the crime is violent is proof that they committed the murder.
Burden of proof is on the defendant in bond proceedings, and I'm not sure how one would even prove the negative there ("there is no way i could possibly be a gang member"). If the prosecution hadn't abandoned that assertion in later proceedings, that'd be a different story.
First, be careful with what you use ChatGPT for. 27 minutes sounds reasonable, but it’s a prediction engine, and it’s very good at making up plausible-sounding answers to things it has no idea about, so you can’t cite it as a source. That number may be random for all we know.
Secondly, the Garcia case concerns me, not because of the specifics of the case, but for the principle of the matter. I remember Rand Paul filibustering to demand the answer to: “Can an American sitting at a cafe in Bowling Green be killed by a drone strike”, which left a lasting impression on me that I still remember it to this day. I’d like for democrats to focus on pressing the administration as to if an American citizen can be deported to El Salvador and if the administration can then refuse a court order to release them. What happened to Garcia is, at the very least, a miscarriage of justice and it’s actively good to try to secure his return pending the conclusion of his court proceedings, but people aren’t dumb, Trump has openly said that he’s considering sending citizens there. This is a principle they could stand on fight on, they just haven’t and have focused on trying to make Garcia a martyr, which, yeah, isn’t going to breach the Trump echo chamber.
I truly haven’t seen any democratic figure or even online liberals trying to make him a martyr. Chris Van Hollen had stated multiple times, including on Fox News he isn’t advocating for the man, he’s advocating for his rights and the implication it has for the rest of the country.
When I say “make him a martyr” I mean putting focus on his specific case, extolling his virtues, appealing to the (manifest) unfairness. The problem is that if counterfactuals exist that undermine the hagiography (e.g. Van Hollen saying “He’s traumatised and separated from his wife and autistic child” vs the unpursued DV accusation for example) the MAGA group is going to cling to those counterfactuals to justify his treatment rather than engaging with the principle of the matter (i.e. “He’s a gang member, who cares he he gets screwed, he deserves it”). They should keep working to get Garcia justice, but that is maybe not the persuasive electoral argument whereas, at least to my mind, “Trump thinks he can deport you for any reason and leave you locked up in a foreign country without trial” might be the better principle to die on the hill of and has the most upside if you can get the administration to disavow. It lets you fight the more sympathetic case without having to wait for the better test case
Agree on that point, we should not really argue on whether he’s a good person or not. I have seen a few people say he’s an innocent person (which is not a sound claim), but I have also seen a lot of people arguing that his character is irrelevant, he was never charged or convicted of a crime and this is about the precedent it sets and the implications of Trump defying the courts rather than Garcia himself. I have had conversations with a few MAGAs about this and reiterating that this could happen to a US citizen seemed to be the most persuasive. That you wouldn’t be able to prove you’re a citizen if you just get shipped on a plane. and I actually think focusing on the fact that he’s now calling the Supreme Court “radical left” bc they ruled against him breaking the law is also persuasive - large swaths of people think Trump should obey court orders. I think ignoring it to talk about tariffs is insanely stupid.
Concur, there’s going to be a time to focus on tariffs, but doing it now when the issue is “paused” is just going to numb people to it well before an election.
If, in 2026/2028 both issues are salient that’s the time to play this game of “what should the messaging be”. Right now, I think there’s time to pick principles.
But... the guy has a deportation order! He could have legally been deported anywhere but El Salvador! And he's in another country, so how can a court order him back?
I think it's insanely stupid to make an issue of this case, where a guy who clearly should have been deported, and is undisputely an ILLEGAL, got deported to the wrong country.
It is never good politics to support ILLEGALS. No quarter to those who spit on this country's laws and invade it.
And let's be real - you think Obama or Biden never accidentally deported a citizen? It has happened. There have been lawsuits over it.
and how would you do that if you get shipped out of the country before the government verifies it through the courts? We are relying on the good faith of ICE agents to check everyone's passports before they put people on planes? At best, you are allowing ICE to detain US Citizens with no probable cause and asking them to prove citizenship to get out. This just happened with a US citizen in Florida who did not speak English. That goes against the 5th amendment pretty clearly.
There does need to be some procedure for declaring that you are a citizen, as well as a truly, truly brutal and barbaric punishment for those who abuse the process when they're not in fact a citizen.
You can't have one without the other. It's not fair. Otherwise illegals will abuse the process and falsely claim they are citizens just to slow things down. We need to strike fear in their hearts.
I propose everyone deported has the opportunity to sign a form stating, under penalty of perjury, that they are a citizen, and if they're not, they authorize the government to torture them or do anything it wants to them for the rest of their life.
If they sign it, their claim gets adjudicated. If it turns out that they committed perjury and lied, and are not a citizen, then we can do anything we want with the scumbag, slavery, forced labor, firing squad, brutal torture, seize all their property, whatever.
> "if an American citizen can be deported to El Salvador and if the administration can then refuse a court order to release them"
Well, hold on. If someone is deported to El Salvador, the administration does not have the ability to release him, because he is then in El Salvador's hands and it's El Salvador's decision what to do. The court has no jurisdiction over El Salvador.
Okay, but you see how this is a problem right? Let's say that in the middle of the night they throw you onto a plane and deport you to El Salvador over a clerical error. If the Administration then gets to shrug and say "oops, nothing we can do anymore", you've been deprived of due process rights, you're deprived of your habeas corpus rights, you're deprived of your right to a trial before your peers and the government faces no consequences for doing this and no obligation to remedy it because "oh, they're in a different country, nothing we can do to bring them back"... You could have a habeas petition so compelling that it would succeed in securing your release before every court in the country, but if you're in a foreign country, this administration seems to think that it can just shrug and say "oh, too bad, we acknowledge he shouldn't have been sent there, but we refuse to take any action to attempt to secure his release"
That's why we need to have the fight now to *prevent* them from depriving others of their rights like Garcia has been rather than waiting for them to abuse due process further.
Another example of a similar problem - say they send in special forces to kill you.
It's not possible to raise the dead, so you've been deprived of all rights and it can't be remedied. The administration can shrug and say "oops, nothing we can do, he's dead." A court can't order the dead raised, and even if they did, that order can't be obeyed.
And the government faces no consequences, due to pardons and presidential immunity.
I'm not sure what the "fight" would be or how you want to prevent it. There doesn't seem to be a way of stopping it that doesn't create worse problems. What is your actual proposal to change the system to prevent that?
I’m sorry, you’ve lost the plot. I agree that sending in special forces to kill people is wrong without an active article of war authorized by Congress. All you’ve done is take my example and made it worse, which is a distinction without a difference for what we’re talking about. A is bad, B is bad too, both should be prevented. And if that did happen there would be investigations, calls for resignations, and your family COULD sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Which isn’t a remedy, but your example emphasises even further the necessity of preventing the government from abridging your rights *BEFORE* they actually do.
Obviously the solution is putting political and legal pressure on the executive to return Garcia and disavow any claim of authority to repeat what they did to him or expand their program to citizens as they’ve been threatening. Also, courts have ordered prior administrations to facilitate the return of people deported to foreign countries before and the federal government has previously made efforts to do so and has been successful (especially when working with allies, like El Salvador is). If the issue was that El Salvador was stonewalling us, that would be one thing, instead Trump sits beaming as their President says that he won’t return a wrongfully deported person to the country. The issue isn’t that the government hasn’t been successful in returning Garcia, it’s that it hasn’t even tried.
Trump cannot be allowed to use deportations to foreign states, especially of American Nationals, as a backdoor to deprive people of rights they would have in America. Legally, he should be forbidden from deporting people without providing them with due process (which is something the SCOTUS already ordered) and if he refuses, he should be impeached and removed from office. If the Congress won’t do that we go to the ballot box and fight to elect people that will. Heaven forbid we have to go farther than that
Did I really make your example worse? Personally, I'd rather be killed than deported to an El Salvador prison where I'd likely be raped and tortured. But anyway.
Interesting about the FTCA. Does that not apply in this situation? Seems like he or his family would have a cause of action against the government. Possibly a 1983 claim?
Clearly what's actually going on is that Trump has outfoxed the courts by asking El Salvador for Garcia's return, with the tacit understanding that he has to ask but doesn't really want Garcia returned.
This clever move outfoxed the courts and the liberals, because the courts are now stymied. They can't order Trump to put pressure on El Salvador, because that's getting into foreign policy, violating separation of powers. They can, maybe, order him to ask, but asking is futile because of that tacit understanding.
Not only that, but the guy is extremely unsympathetic, making it hard for anyone to defend him, and he's an illegal with a deportation order, making it questionable whether he has the same rights as citizens.
10/10 A++ politics, would elect him again. I know you disagree, but you have to at least admire the political skill and the way he outfoxed his foes. This is art.
As far as your proposed "solutions," political pressure and impeachment are not going to work - clearly the political will isn't there and he is not getting impeached over this, let alone removed. That leaves legal pressure - can you elaborate on what you're envisioning?
The other thing is that it's not clear to me that Garcia's due process rights were actually violated. If he had been deported 50 miles away to Guatemala, there'd be no issue, right? So clearly what we need is a second prison in Guatemela, to solve this problem. But given that he could have legally been deported to Guatemela, and he's now been deported to El Salvador, how have his due process rights been denied? He went through the proper process. His right to not be deported to El Salvador, assuming he has such a right, was violated, but that's a substantive right.
1) The ends can NEVER justify bad means. I don’t care if you feel that Garcia is a monster who should be deported, if Trump can circumvent the rule of law to win with Garcia, he can do the same thing with you or I. I don’t admire Trump’s political skill, because its not about winning for me, its about doing the right thing, its about securing liberty, and Trump isn’t. Trump is excellent at scoring political points, but political points are meaningless or worse if it’s accompanied with backsliding of things like habeas rights and due process.
2) Yes, Garcia’s due process rights were violated. He was sent to the one country that the government was told they weren’t allowed to send him to. Maybe removing him to Guatemala would be legal, but he wasn’t removed to Guatemala, he was removed to El Salvador without the government prevailing in a termination of withholding from removal status hearing. That’s a dramatic failure of effective process. Further, most of the deportees (perhaps all in the first batch) were not given sufficient time to challenge the determinations of their gang membership in court, which is, in and of itself, a due process violation. This seems to have been done so that Trump could deport them before the legality of these deportations could be challenged in court. Then, the administration, not having moved fast enough, had to ignore a court order to turn the planes around (while the planes were over international airspace, the people directing the plains were still under the jurisdiction of American courts). To me this looks like a concerted effort to keep political enemies from due process until it was too late. That’s the playbook we saw with Garcia for sure.
3) Your logic of “oh well what’s your better solution then” is absurd and seems to give the federal executive free reign to act lawlessly as long as there’s not a way to expressly stop them. As I said the courts should stop any further deportations without the deportee receiving the ability to challenge that status in court (Which the SCOTUS has ordered). They should also use their discovery powers to peer into internal administration communications ascertain what efforts have been made to recover Garcia and hold those who decided not to work to bring him back and those who have contravened a court order to inform the court of said steps taken in contempt, including, if necessary, jail time
4) I see why the other person you were arguing with found this tiresome. If you don’t value your rights enough to see the dangers of letting an administration trample others’ rights, I have nothing to say to you. It seems that you value immediate victory in the political arena more than protecting civil liberties. If this were Obama or Biden the GOP would suddenly rediscover the importance of due process and it’s that inconsistency that kills me.
Nate is probably correct that focusing on Garcia won’t move the polls much in the short term. However, virtually any short term poll movement will be swamped in the medium term by the state of the economy.
Democrats need to avoid toxic stances, eg Biden’s impotent response to chaos at the border and support for gender dysphoric men playing women’s sports. They need the economy to break against Trump. Nothing else matters much.
While I don't think you're exactly wrong, I think that the violation to due process is important enough that it makes sense to put a lot of pressure on even if it's not an issue that as many people in the country care about. I also think that if the Abrego Garcia case hadn't been pursued as vigorously by Democrats, there was a good chance they'd get backlash from progressives who have been frustrated that they're not doing enough.
I also think there's an argument that the tariffs issue will inevitably come back around as it starts to materially impact Americans. Abrego Garcia may be distracting people from that issue right now, but the consequences of a financial downturn can never really stay out of the public consciousness for very long.
While I agree with you, part of Nate‘s point is that most people on both sides of the aisle care a lot less about due process than you might think. Much of the left certainly decided not to care about it in the me-too era.
Not really counter to my point, which is basically that even if the public doesn't care about it right now, it's still very important, and if it escalated enough the public would eventually care about it a lot, in which case it would be better they put in the work now. And even if the left is inconsistent about their love for due process (not sure I exactly agree with this part of your point, but not worth arguing about), they definitely care about this particular case.
On the merits, I 100% agree with you. But due process can only be enforced by the courts and the government, not the public. My point (and I think Nate’s point too, but I don’t want to put words in his mouth) is that the only thing that can actually stop Trump is winning elections, and Abrego Garcia is not a good test case in that field.
What I'm kind of responding to is the implication that the democrats (who are part of the government, if a minority) should stop harping on this because it won't sway public opinion, and I'm just saying that other factors are more important in this case than whether it (immediately) impacts public opinion. Tariffs aren't going anywhere, that issue is going to come back around as the economic impacts are felt.
And I do think they would pay a huge enthusiasm cost on the left if they didn't seem to give a damn about this kind of issue. If we were close to an election, I'd say scoring immediate short term points in the centre matters more than that, but it's still early 2025, so they can afford to look longer term.
I think them harping on it makes them look bad and hurts them in the long term by draining voters. Which is Trump's whole point here.
This is rope-a-dope - Trump goaded them into defending an illegal gangster with a deportation order who got deported to the wrong country.
This just enhances the public's (accurate) image of the left as the party that cares more about illegals and lazy bums than hard-working American citizens.
The left is definitely inconsistent about that - it is the Trump administration that fought for due process for people accused of sexual assault on college campuses, and Biden who reversed that, for instance.
As for this particular case, I think only the most extreme progressives and leftists care about it. Most people who vote Democratic don't like gangsters and illegals either.
> "I also think that if the Abrego Garcia case hadn't been pursued as vigorously by Democrats, there was a good chance they'd get backlash from progressives who have been frustrated that they're not doing enough."
You say that like it's a bad thing.
For real, I think backlash from progressives would help the Democrats politically. They badly need a Sister Soljah moment.
And opposing progessives is good as far as policy and ethics, as well, but that's just my view.
I don't think the issue is about "Abrego Garcia" at all.
The issue is 261 people were picked up off the streets in America and sent to a prison in a foreign country and left there to rot.
They have no charges, no convictions, no sentences, they are just gone - disappeared.
They can contact no one, not family, not attorneys, and the administration claims that US courts have no no jurisdiction.
And both Trump and Rubio who set the deal up (check the video) said they could use this for U.S. citizens as well.
This also isn't deportation, we are paying a foreign government to keep people in prison and they claim they are due no legal rights, and there is no recourse.
This isn't about some being, or not being a gang member, it is about being put outside of all judicial review and left in a hellhole prison to rot.
That's the issue. I do appreciate that people's attention span is limited, but politics does work on multiple fronts, some people will resonate with an economic story, some will resonate with a rights story.
And while only talking about democracy did not win the day in November, it isn't that people didn't hear it. They just did not really see it in Trump's first term (pre election), and so imaged it wouldn't matter. And so now that it does, and they are going full authoritarian, it would be good to point it out.
While also pointing out you can think about it as the economy tanks.
agree here. its a little harder to deny there is no threat to democracy/our republic when it is actively happening, especially when Trump is now attacking his own Supreme Court and at least one Republican Congress members has stated openly she is afraid of Trump's retribution. During the election, it was an abstract concept
I feel like the best approach on the "immigration" vs "economy" messaging is neither to retreat nor take the bait. Hit and pivot.
"It's this kind of lawless and haphazard enforcement, that is so emblematic of Trump's sloppy approach to the economy that is taking us into an unending nosedive. Small business and local manufacturing..."
"Haphazard" and "sloppy" is subtly implying that Trump's incompetence might also pose a problem for effectively enforcing immigration, not just being "too bold" and lawless. And then it takes it directly pivots to the economy. This idea of an "unending" nosedive also implies "this guy has to stop and change", which is what you hope he will do on his immigration issues as well.
No, you don't understand, you can't have a nuanced, clever, moderate approach to this that might actually work! You have to pick an extreme side and fight for it and attack the other side!
Better to talk about the "gay hairdresser", Andry Hernandez Romero.
Harmless guy with tats gets confused for a gang member and sent to our gulag.
No lawyer, no trial, no sentence, no appeal, no conditions for getting out.
No willingness to accept a mistake was made.
I'm fine with someone getting kicked out of the country if they don't have permission to be here, but what exactly is Trump's end game with him?
Is there any standard that says "The punishment for being in the country illegally is indefinite confinement"?
The amount of political capital spent on illegals and migrants is insane. Trump wants that fight.
The Democrats need to focus on tariffs, inflation, the economy, protecting social security, and attacking Elon. They should be looking to 2028.
Letting the president run a gulag and not talking about it because one wants to focus on Nikes getting pricey seems like a poor choice to me.
Poor in what sense? Morally? Quite possibly. But the argument here, which I can’t disagree with, is that the end result - getting rid of Trump - needs to be the focus. And agree or not, not enough of the country gives a shit about Abrego Garcia compared to destructive tariffs.
Your political instincts are not where the American public is or ever will be.
Yes, it’s better for democrats to talk about the cost of shoes. Parents care about the costs, working class people care etc.
Trump is now polling underwater on immigration. I'd say that talking about it is working.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/issues/immigration
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/issues/economy
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/issues/inflation
Immigration should not be democrats focus. Trump wants that fight.
That average spread covers one and a half months of polls. The most recent polls all show him underwater on immigration. The fact is that Trump is already losing on the economy, and focusing on immigration has been successfully eroding support on his biggest issue. I don't think it really matters which fight Trump wants because Trump is extremely incompetent and wants all kinds of fights he will not win.
If you want to actually achieve something and not simply engage in self-congratulatory moral posturing - the inflation and nikes being expensive is where the political win is
Or you can follow the standard Lefty Purity Pony path over the decades and engage in the moral posturing and pat yourself on the back about the correct moral choice as Trump erodes away.
This utterly cynical attitude that having principles is cringe, nobody really believes in anything and that all that matters is triangulating to win the media cycle for the day is a total fucking cancer on politics.
Having principles you genuinely believe in and being willing to stand up for them is Good, Actually.
The Moral Superiority Posturing of the Leftist Fringes is self-indulgent own-back-patting - of course the statement above is a fine example of a series of logical fallacies - itself a red herring based on the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle as of course crafting winning coalitions and compromise does not at all mean believing in nothing - while hand waiving about media of course is nothing more than a red herring to avoid admission one has failed to win over voters, the point of democracy. But rigidi idelodogues of all sides never can see that.
I suppose it will never change, the posturing of the 1930s onwards.
Actually winning elections and actually achieving things rather than self-congratulatory posturing while not actually achieving anything is nothing more than self-righteous self-indulgence that in fact as we are seeing now brings actual broad harms.
No one cares what your sensibilities are though dude. Americans live here, in the US, with their Nikes - not in El Salvador or in some resistance encampment for your pet political issue. Educated liberals can grandstand all they want, but when citizens have to buy their kids new shoes, they're going to vote on that and leave your ideals in the bin.
Is the guy a citizen of El Salvador? Does the US have any jurisdiction or standing once a non-citizen has been removed from its borders?
Romero is Venezuelan. A lot of people are saying he's from the gang known as Tren de Aragua.
"Jurisdiction" or "standing" aren't exactly the right terms. If you believe in realpolitik, other countries can do what they want, it's just a question of what we do about it.
But no, there aren't any treaties or anything that would let us compel another country to send back a third country's citizen we deported there, though we could certainly ask, bribe, threaten, beg, or cajole them. Trump's agreement with El Salvador does not have a "takebacks" clause.
""Jurisdiction" or "standing" aren't exactly the right terms. If you believe in realpolitik, other countries can do what they want, it's just a question of what we do about it."
Well, the problem is that a US court can hold the government liable for improper procedures in deporting someone, but it's not like the courts have force of law to get them back.
I don't see the problem, but yes, that's the idea. The courts have limited power in telling the president how to deal with foreign countries. And of course they have no power over foreign countries directly.
It was clever of the Trump admin to do things that way when dealing with hostile courts.
It's not even really clear how the court could "hold the government liable." What does that mean?
"It's not even really clear how the court could "hold the government liable." What does that mean?"
Some form of punishment for not following due process, or in the Garcia case deporting him to the country he was barred from being deported to.
Punishment? How would the court do that?
Trump has immunity and can pardon anyone, remember?
Essentially every single member of the Democratic Party, with a straight face, told the American people that an 81 year old man with a 38% approval rating was our best defense against fascists.
When authoritarians rise to power, their ascent can be linked not only to their own political savvy, but ALSO the ineptitude of their opposition.
None of the individuals currently railing against Trump (Pritzker, Newsome, Booker, even Bernie/AOC) have a shred of credibility, because they ALL toed the party line on Biden’s re-nomination. For all the Dems’ handwringing about how “history is repeating itself” in Trump’s ascent to power, I’ve yet to see a single major Democratic figure hold a big fat shiny mirror up to themselves and acknowledge their own egregious mistakes in the 2024 election. Unless and until that happens - or unless an outsider who DIDN’T toe that line appears - the Democratic Party will continue to be undercut as the feckless idiots who put us here to begin with.
And, um, Democrats supported tariffs until a few minutes ago.
Tariffs are not a binary issue. They're a complex policy question. One can support some tariff proposals but not others, especially since the tariffs have changed a few times recently.
They really are not.
That's why actual proper economists are universally anti-tariff - e.g. Krugman, no righty.
Tariffs are bad economics, period.
They really, really are a complex policy question. Please read a little more about pro-tariff arguments. Even Krugman has written about situations where he supports them.
They're not always bad economics. We have a trade imbalance that needs to be dealt with somehow.
I am a professional economist, I don't need to read innumerate nonsense written by isolationsists and ex-socialist Peronist types about tarriffs.
There is absolutely no problem with the US good trade deficit - what there is a problem with is US productive investment in infrastructure and enalbing of competitive enterprises.
Economic literacy, not failed quasi-Socialist models that Latin America already spent decades showing are economic illteracy and emo-nationalist nonsense.
Republicans hated tariffs until a few minutes ago.
This is indeed one of the truly bizarre things - but it is a lesson in the degree to which party politics
I used to think this was uniquely a Bolshevik thing but sadly now.
I honestly think equating the two positions is incredibly reductive and is only motivated by the lack of any ability to form a coherent defence of Trump's absurd trrif process, quantity, and rollout.
Democrats can most certainly still approve of the use of tarrifs, and opposed this fiasco on principal grounds rather than partisanship thenor as there's no evidence to support any of the claims of the Trump administration. Republicans, on the other hand, have championed the reduction and elimination of tariffs, starting with Nixon and up through NAFTa and the TPP.
Clinton signed NAFTA into law. Both sides are being inconsistent with their principles, but Dems are correct to violate theirs. Outside of politics, there is no reason for tariffs.
Let's be real here, you're not fooling anyone with cherry picking singular details out of a long story in attempt to revise history. It was a cornerstone of the Reagan campaign that was largely negotiated by the Bush administration, and while Clinton signed it many Democrats in Congress didn't vote for it. Which really rest my case the I made. Democrats aren't, and haven't been, wholly for or against tarrifs.
The both sides thing is getting old.
And were labeled an enemy of the working class, which present a conundrum for Democrats vying to present an alternative.
Supporting or not supporting tariffs is also not a clear cut issue. Tariffs can be helpful if targeted to specific industries and products and have a clear strategy. The point of trumps tariffs is also nuanced. Are they a negotiating strategy? He hasn’t made any deals yet and in fact, China seems to have the upper hand now instead of being isolated. Bring back manufacturing? What kind of manufacturing? Why put tariffs on all goods? Will this lower prices of goods? Will Americans be laid off from high paying jobs and now working in factories? Why do you support increasing taxes on American consumers. Everything about Trump requires discussion bc he says short catchy statements and presents them as fact bc he has no integrity and doesn’t care if they are true or not.
Trump's tariffs on intermediate goods seem almost designed to deindustrialize the US.
It is 100% clear cut
Tariffs are economic iliteracy - that all proper economists - e.g. Krugman to cite a decidely not righty - agree.
The only time one may desire to use them is for political retaliation reasons.
We need to bring manufacturing back into this country. We need to decouple from the country we're at war with.
How do you suggest we do that?
The US needs to boost productive investment not "bring manufacturing" back - especially driven by economically illiterate nostalgia over an idealised memory of the 1960s.
The industrial on-shoring strtegy needs economic competitiveness.
Trump reruning Brazilian, Argetinian LatAm Liberational anti-capitalist trade policy is doing nothing but dressing up quais Maoist politics in thread-bear populist closing to dupe the Rubes.
And the US is not "at war" with any particular country at this moment. In competition certainly but not at war.
US economic competitiveness would be based on Literal economic policy - including automation of ports, permitting streamling, process streamlining (had Trump pursued these he would have done real good to cut genuine red tape), long-term industrial asset investment incentives and above all energy infrastructure - hard infrastructure (grids, generation) for lower non-volatile
The Biden Admin's chip initiative had the right top line ideas (as one can see from actual private investment that it triggered) but like other Biden things, allowed to bog down in red-tape and wokey nonsense and lefty nonsense on making everything union (nothing against including some modest carrots for unions but no fan of labor unions).
I agree it's probably not a clear-cut issue, but I'm not sure it matters.
The stock market reaction to the tariff plan did cut through the noise, and it did impact the retirement of millions of Americans.
I'm also suspicious of the claim that everything about Trump requires discussion. Democrats don't need to explain the nuances of their tariff plan, just like Trump doesn't necessarily need to explain what his plan even is.
If a buck counts for less next year, and it counts for even less the year after that, that's the entire argument. It doesn't even matter if tariffs didn't cause it. Democrats can say Trump shouldn't have tariffed at all, should have tariffed differently, that God has punished America for electing him, or that Trump's simply a moron.
The only reason many Americans accept all of the constant nonsense from Trump is that they think his assholery and braggadocio will improve the average American's position. Making trade deals, stopping illegal immigration, halting America's involvement in foreign wars. The core of the Trump case is that this will bring prosperity. If it doesn't, people are going to wonder why they accepted all of the stupid stuff about him.
They are helpful in securing the support of relatively fungible working class voters without broader economic harms. At best, they are politically expedient. They are not helpful.
There weren't any "fascists" on the ballot. That kind of nonsense is why the Democrats lost.
To win, the Democrats need to moderate, and they need to start acknowledging that there are complex policy questions that the right has a valid point of view on, even if they disagree. Right now they're the dogmatic party that thinks the other side is evil fascists. That is not a winning message.
I agree with you. My point is, THEY claimed we were facing down fascists, and then in the same breath told us that Joe Biden, whom 80% of voters thought too old for the job, was our best option for fighting said fascists. If they believed that, they’re too dumb to run the country, and if they DIDN’T believe it, they’re too obsequious. Neither of those is a good look for a political party. Ps I personally reached out multiple times to my own elected representatives, and prominent senators/reps from other states, AND Obama, asking why no one was even calling for debates/a true primary, and NO ONE responded. So color me resentful, yeah.
I think it’s more about the *lessons* they should learn from it than anything. Nobody will care about whether or not Biden was fit to run for re-election in 2027/28 during the next election season
I’m sorry reading this made me a lil angry. This shit doesn’t deserve the same consultant strategizing as how Dems should hit the sweet spot on trans issues to win back moderate voters in swing states. See who’s making the maximum noise about these deportations, it’s civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald, not immigrant rights activists.
This is about whether Trump admin can admit it was a mistake to send him to a foreign gulag and then feign helplessness when asked if the client state we are paying to house him can returned him so we can see his case in court and put him on a deportation proceeding to a country other than El Salvador if need be.
This is very reminiscent of Bush trying to send Muslims with alleged far fetched “terrorist” connections to Gitmo to be tortured because if in America, they would have to provide evidence and they didn’t really have any. The vibe after 9/11 was intense and it WASN’T popular to put any restraint on the president to prosecute alleged “terrorists”. It was tough because though the people Bush was sending to Gitmo weren’t terrorists, they probably weren’t the most sympathetic cases either. But it was one of the most shameful things America engaged in. I wish more politicians and elites had pushed back against it even if it would have cost them the election. That courage was very rare at the time. Not pushing back against Bush allowed the precedent to be set that Trump is now exploiting: that people who we suspect of nefarious links but can’t prove in court can be sent to foreign chambers to take care of it.
Eventually, no pushback against the mass hysteria post 9/11 led to one of the biggest American disasters of the 21st century manifesting in the Iraq War.
LEfties Being Angry is going to achieve f-all by itelf, except Feel Good Moral Posturing. The same reaction certainly did not stop Gitmo at all.
To actually achieve a political result you need to do politics, not college campus activist posturing.
Ergo one needs to focus on the real political leverage that moves the public - the public as they are not as you would like them to be.
Glenn Greenwald isn't a leftie, is he? I know Hanania and Andrew Sullivan aren't. I don't know who has been writing all of the National Review articles condemning the administration's handling of Abrego Garcia's case, but someone has and given it's the National Review, they're conservative.
This case, and (to a lesser extent) the Khalil case cut across left-right lines. There are real concerns about ascendant authoritarianism, suppression of freedom of speech, and defeat of due process being articulated by people whose support of Trump was previously driven by Trump's opposition to DEI.
But yeah, that still doesn't mean it's a useful issue. My guess is that this libertarian group is pretty small.
It's just crushingly depressing that people across the political spectrum can look at what Trump's doing and uniformly agree it's trashing the 5th amendment... But Nate can come along and quite convincingly argue that it doesn't matter because shoe prices.
Nate may be right, but I'm worried about the next authoritarian already, because they'll have better economic policies than Trump. Is that really all it takes to gut our rights? I used to assume people cared more than this.
Greenwald is a fruitcake.
But the red herring of others iconoclosts upset about this doesn't mean anything if the wider population doesn't move. Eggheadism and as Silver puts it the Great Cope in engaging in magical thinking thta if one just explain a bit more the Unwashed Masses will be converted is a path to losing.
Whining about the fialures of human kind morality is self-defeatism.
I do personally wish that this case got people upset - it upserts me but it does not move wider population which is in the throws of anti-immigrant reaction.
and to stop Trump, stop playing Don Quixote.
I mostly agree with this, but I have to emphasize that there really does need to be work on the "wider population" in the background. A populace that cares only about its immediate prosperity is not capable of sustaining civil liberties in the long term.
There is such a thing as a permission structure, and I think we can expect them to continue to be created on the right with respect to these issues.
More broadly, public opinion isn't immovable. It does respond to what political elites say. This is how you end up with a substantial portion of Republicans sanguine about abandoning Ukraine, for instance.
I'm not saying Democrats or left-leaning media should rely on the Abrego Garcia case to win in 2026 or 2028. That's a shorter term issue, and Nate's right that stuff like tariffs should be the focus. I'm saying we, as a self-governing society, cannot long endure if we remain indifferent to civil liberties.
as a civil libertarian who is very happy with Trump and this case, I don't understand the issue. This guy is an illegal. He has no right to be in this country. He had a deportation order. Yes, he got deported to El Salvador instead of Guatemala, which was a mistake. No, there's nothing that can be done about it now. But there weren't any due process violations here. This just isn't a civil liberties issue.
Ya I’m willing to admit that imo it’s worth losing elections in order to make a fuss about this. I would’ve been ok with a narrow republican election win back in 2000s if Dems opposed Iraq more fervently. What made Iraq and War on Terror so pernicious was the bipartisan stamp of approval where dissenters started to question their sanity. Electeds are in Congress for a reason, what’s the point of having political capital if u are not willing to burn it to prevent an authoritarian precedent to be set.
Losing Electoins means enabling MORE of this not less
Prim and pious moral posturing that ends up in losing is nothing more than comfortable bourgeousie self-indulgences on your own morality.
Winning elections is the path to stopping.
Simple as that.
Would generally agree with this except on certain issues. For example, imo in hindsight if Iraq was more polarized with more Democratic dissenters at the time, Bush would have not been allowed such a long leash to carry out that stupidity. It is hard to overstate how essential the bipartisan sheen from centrist liberal publications was to selling Iraq to the public and for it to be allowed to linger for so long. Maybe Dems would have still lost moderate voters and lost the election but polarizing that issue would’ve cut Bush’s zeal since they are still around 30% committed libs in this country. It is always the equation of how much you value the issue multiplied by the risk that it would be electorally bad exponentially to the power of whether losing the election this cycle would even be bad for your political project. It is simply not obvious to me whether Trump winning in 2020 would’ve been good or bad from a left wing perspective. Political parties win or lose elections thermostatically and power changes hands every couple of years. These things are hard to do game theory around.
Matt Bruenig did a post that I broadly agree with explaining the dysfunctional coalition dynamics that lead to this “moral posturing” or what I what call the further left faction within Dem coalition trying to exert their power: https://mattbruenig.com/2023/10/26/dysfunctional-coalition-politics/
So I'm a civil libertarian who is very happy with Trump and this case, and I don't understand the issue. This guy is an illegal. He has no right to be in this country. He had a deportation order.
Yes, he got deported to El Salvador instead of Guatemala, which was a mistake. No, there's nothing that can be done about it now. But there weren't any due process violations here. This just isn't a civil liberties issue.
Nonsense, there is a reason we don’t live in a purely majoritarian country where our rights can be taken away if more than 50% of the country agrees with it.
There you go, looking on the bright side😉
The people we are deporting now are the ones who would cause the next Holocaust.
What?
Think that's a reference to the campus idiots, whom even the Dems are smart enough not to defend. But yeah, kinda overshooting the runway for the purposes of this conversation.
Ah I see, thanks for the clarifying comment. JC is referring to the notorious campus protestors with their slogans like "stop the bombing" and "ceasefire now" but with their real secret agenda of mass murder.
guess who's funding them
Someone who frightens you I'm sure.
Oh, I mistook you for an honest broker.
Interesting, I took you for someone who was trying to explain something that was inherently irrational.
Huh? Not at all. The people who are being deported are antisemitic activists. The Dems are indeed defending them.
(But yes, it's a reference to the campus idiots, and the people rallying them and organizing and funding them...)
It is worth thinking about historical analogies here. Your argument boils down to: Garcia is Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks hasn't come along yet, or isn't well enough known yet. Fine, maybe they should talk more about Andry or one of the other kidnapped people instead.
But here's another analogic question. If you were a German Social Democrat in the early 1930s, would you have deliberately refrained from calling out Hitler's evil lies about Jews because other issues were more favorable to you?
One depressing thing I am trying to convey with that analogy is that, if American voters cannot be convinced that the rule of law and due process actually matter, American democracy may be doomed regardless of Democratic Party messaging strategy.
It is always the 1930s and everyone you disagree with is always Hitler.
This is exactly the kind of hysterical wolf-crying that has so fatally undermined the Democratic Party.
Exactly this. Mike Godwin warned them about this years ago, but they didn't listen.
Many people spoke out about Hitler's lies. The issue with Germany was that even pre-Hitler, German courts were a joke, the congress was deadlocked and incompetent, hyperinflation ran rampant. There really were greedy businessmen taking advantage of the chaos (just not the Jews as it happened).
If (...) I thought today was similar to Weimar Germany, I would be trying to lower government spending after COVID to fight inflation, pulling out reserves to keep fuel prices down, passing sensible anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement (Biden actually did do this), drawing down executive power and empowering the courts, wind down Ukraine either with a coalition force or by turning it over to Europe the way Trump is doing (poorly), forcing my side of congress to reform regulations like corrupt licensing practices that keeps goods out of American stores, housing reform, upzoning, etc., actually do something about the immigration crisis (this actually is the executive's job for once, we already have laws on the books).
Biden half-assed half of this and no-assed the rest of it and now we're lapping up the crap left over.
Oh, and here's a closer and more recent practical analogy. If you were a California Democratic strategist in the mid-1990s, would you have advised state-level Democrats to drop their opposition to Prop 187 and stop trying to persuade CA voters to be more pro-immigrant?
Of course - Prop 187 was not only popular, but good policy and the right thing to do.
The economic impacts aren't going to need Dems to stand up and yell about; they're going to be obvious soon enough and so will the cause. The best thing they can probably do is stay out of the way.
The due process fight, on the other hand, not only does need to be explained, but is going to make those fighting for it look wiser and wiser as those more media-friendly victims start to appear. There's political risk in crying wolf, but a payoff when the wolves actually show up.
The whole point of the story of the boy who cried wolf is that it is harmful to the crier precisely at the point when the wolves show up.
If you acclimate voters to the idea that Democrats lie constantly about spurious “threats to democracy”, then if there ever really is a threat to democracy all you've achieved is to guarantee that voters will ignore Democrats' broken-clock warnings.
The fact that anyone thinks the current situation maps onto The Boy Who Cried Wolf is silly. Everyone who's confused by what I just said should go read the story. For what it's worth, broken-clock is closer.
The current behavior of the administration regarding Abrego Garcia's case really is a narrow nullification of the 5th Amendment. The administration has made clear it's going to "look at the law" to see if American citizens could also be sent to El Salvador's prisons. If such a thing ever came to pass, it would at least be a nullification of the 8th Amendment as well.
These are threats to democracy. Every time the Trump administration (or any administration) pulls a move like this, they're weakening the dedication of our political class and our electorate to principles that were laid out over 200 years ago by men who basically spent their entire lives trying to figure out how to avoid tyranny. I think many would agree that their system has worked pretty well, with some major and plenty of minor exceptions. And those who don't agree should at least acknowledge that one of those principles is actually being broken, or we're not even pretending to be coupled to a Constitution anymore.
Instead of recognizing these obvious facts, some are saying "call me when it's The Night of the Long Knives". Brain death. Tyranny, unless done by a complete idiot, creeps slowly. But the steps are noticeable.
The government made a mistake and committed an illegal act when it deported Abrego Garcia. It acknowledges that it was a mistake, and that it was illegal. Every court that has seen the case has indicated that the government's actions defeated Abrego Garcia's due process rights. And every court has indicated a clear remedy (returning him), regardless of their ability to compel the President to get that remedy. The administration has, to the extent it was ordered to do anything, refused to carry out the order in good faith. But I think more importantly, it has refused to use its leverage to obtain that remedy. Just because you can't be compelled to support and defend the Constitution doesn't mean you shouldn't support and defend the Constitution.
Some have pointed out that this defiance has precedents (of a kind) under previous administrations, and they'd be right, but that's only half the story. The other half is what happens 1 or 2 or 10 years from now (under President Vance OR President AOC) if everyone pretends the current events are business as usual.
No, this is not correct.
Every court has not indicated the "clear remedy" of returning him. You don't understand the issue here.
The issue here is that "returning him" is not something the administration can do. The matter is out of the Trump administration's hands. The scumbag in question is in El Salvador subject to a foreign government. No US court can order a foreign government to do something.
Nor can a court order the administration to "use its leverage" to compel a foreign country to do something. That would be interfering in foreign policy. That raises some serious issues and no court is going to do that. It would violate separation of powers. Anyone who supports and defends the Constitution should agree that no court can order a president to use leverage against a foreign country.
And that's really the important and fundamental question here: How much control should courts have over foreign policy?
Yes, every court has indicated that the remedy is for Abrego Garcia to be returned. Read the opinions. This is not in serious dispute. That said, it's not to be confused with the question of whether the courts can compel the Trump administration to use Presidential powers to return him. They can't.
"The issue here is that "returning him" is not something the administration can do. The matter is out of the Trump administration's hands. The scumbag in question is in El Salvador subject to a foreign government. No US court can order a foreign government to do something."
In order: False, false, debatable, and true. The USA has leverage in a million ways over El Salvador. Of course, it need use none of them, because Trump could politely ask Bukele to return Abrego Garcia, and the man would be back in the US in less than 24 hours. These men are on very good terms. It's clear that Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador's custody, but he's there at the behest of the US government. The exact legal nature of Abrego Garcia's detention is not well understood, because the Trump Administration has argued, in court, that the agreement under which Abrego Garcia is being held is classified (this is the part where real civil libertarians reach for their guns). What we do know is that the Trump administration is paying for Abrego Garcia's detention, along with the detention of the other deportees. It's not clear what, if any, relationship there is between Abrego Garcia's detention and any proceedings of the Salvadoran justice system.
All of this said, it's worth emphasizing that a court can't compel a President to do any kind of foreign policy, and that this is a good thing. I'm sure there are people arguing that they should be able to compel the President, and those people are wrong. That would largely, if not totally, defeat the point of the Executive. As important as this is to understand, it really is beside the point.
"Nor can a court order the administration to "use its leverage" to compel a foreign country to do something. That would be interfering in foreign policy. That raises some serious issues and no court is going to do that. It would violate separation of powers. Anyone who supports and defends the Constitution should agree that no court can order a president to use leverage against a foreign country."
We're in agreement. All true. All beside the point.
"And that's really the important and fundamental question here: How much control should courts have over foreign policy?"
It's not the fundamental question. I know this because I expect your answer to this question is "none", which is the same as my answer to the question. And if you read my comment carefully, you would notice that this isn't inconsistent with my position.
My position is:
1. Abrego Garcia's due process rights were violated, at least because of the violation of the withholding of removal order (which, in the administration's defense, was a mistake).
2. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have indicated the remedy for the violation of Abrego Garcia's rights, and that remedy is to return him.
3. The administration is obviously uninterested in obtaining that remedy, and refuses to lift a finger to obtain that remedy.
The courts' ability to compel the President to do anything in terms of foreign policy isn't implicated here. The President's oath to "support and defend the Constitution", and his Constitutional obligation to "take care that the Laws be faithfully executed" are implicated. The President is not making anything close to a good faith effort to support and defend the Constitutional rights of Abrego Garcia, nor to undo his administration's violation of the law. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if you care about the Constitution.
The wolf showed up on January 6, 2021. Then the sheep elected him President.
I think Nate's point is simply that Dems' constant talk of the Garcia case is biting into the tariffs' "mind-share".
So maybe the tariffs don't need Dems to talk about them, but then the Dems should simply shut up and let the tariffs dominate the conversation. That might even be preferable to having the Dems talking about the tarrifs, which would help keep the tariff talk non-partisan.
Yes, attention is a limited resource. So are news cycles.
Trump is winning the rope-a-dope game by getting the Dems to focus on how he's too tough on deporting illegal gang members, which makes him look great and hurts the Dems. He got the Dems to make his case for him by constantly screaming how tough he is on immigration.
being tough on immigration and breaking the law/defying the courts/going around the Constitution are vastly different things. Obama deported more people at a higher rate than Trump, while doing it within the confines of the law. This requires framing because Trump says "they are all illegal gang members" when its easily verifiable that this is not the truth.
Did you forget? At the time, progressives accused Obama of breaking the law and called him the great deporter.
It’s highly questionable that Trump broke the law, defied the courts, or went around the constitution. And doing so sounds pretty tough to me!
How is it easily verifiable that they are not illegals and not gang members?
You're right - progressives did hate on Obama for that which shows that elected Democrats and leftists are not the same.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a withholding of removal status, which allows a person to stay and legally work in the United States. Andry had a pending asylum claim. Those are verifiable by court records. The law allows people to seek asylum and stay in the US with temporary legal status, whether or not you think it should be illegal.
You think its highly questionable he broke the law - Judge Wilkinson, A Reagan appointee on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, sees it differently.
Go watch Shawn Fain's interview on MSNBC a few days ago. The tariff situation is complicated.
There is nothing wrong with tariffs in a vacuum and they can be useful if implemented strategically. I don’t think anyone in good faith can say this admin has been implementing them strategically.
From a free trade point of view any tariff is a bad idea. What Fain is talking about is de facto protectionism, but he represents a key voting bloc that will probably decide the winner in 2028.
I'm sure Americans are getting all of this in their 13.6 minutes of news consumption per day...right?
I tend to agree with the net conclusion here, but I'm grappling with a few counterfactuals that might not be directly measurable in polling data:
1 - letting them get away with this without a fight could have more long-term detrimental effects than short-term polling flatlines/dips (e.g. emboldening them to keep pushing the line on what they think they can get away with).
2 - this could be the issue that reawakens the anti-trump movement and mobilizes left-leaning "elites" with disproportionate influence or potential to step up as new voices to lead the party
3 - democratic messaging around "democracy" generally plays straight into every bad stereotype of pompous, out of touch, over-dramatic coastal elite tracy flicks defending institutions that have failed most people. Does grandstanding about threats to democracy poll poorly? Sure. Would real-talk like "what happened innocent until proven guilty?", "if i defied a court order i'd be thrown in jail, why can the oligarchs people running our government get away with it?", "i'm disgusted by how i'm seeing these people treated and i have to speak out for what i believe in" poll poorly? Maybe not?
I'm as into following the data as anyone here, but I sometimes worry it might stifle action and experimentation. I wonder if there's a world where authentically taking a stand on things they care about even if they don't 100% align to polling ends up having a net-positive halo effect for democrats vs the current MO of overly optimized "derisked" talking points.
This right here - if Democrats never stand up for what’s right bc they only want to do what polls well to regain power, then how do they convince people they are better than Trump or Republicans - that helps the “both parties are the same” narrative
Moral imperatives aside, I think talking like real people about things they really care about could help their popularity as well. Think about how many 2024 Trump voters said something like “I don’t like Trump and I don’t agree with him about X, but at least he says what he really feels.”
For sure - the Democracy is a threat narrative didn't land it was abstract and also not currently happening in real time. Listening to the strategists and consultants and using overly intellectual language is a Democratic flaw. However, I will say its difficult to hear when the same people say "Trump tells it like it is" but will also in the same breath say "He's just trolling/joking to rile up the left" (Gaza, Canada, Greenland, third term, etc)
This, exactly. That's a big part of why I voted for him. Whereas Kamala seemed like she was trying to figure out what she should say in response to every question.
well, if they want to convince people they're better than Trump, they could start by being better than Trump. They're not.
Nate - I’m not sure what your complaint is here. The “Democratic Party” isn’t doing anything about either of these things. Most Democrats have been silent about tariffs AND silent about Garcia. Van Hollen went down to El Salvador, but AOC and Schumer didn’t. I wish the party would DO SOMETHING as a start about anything. The media is covering Garcia because it’s a case with a lot of action whereas there isn’t a lot of new economic news every day.
It's not a complaint, it's just the observation that the Dem party / media is focused on an issue that helps Trump.
In order to do something, they have to have power. In order to have power, they have to win supporters.
Right now, they're losing supporters by focusing on an issue where Trump is in the right, has the high ground, and has the people's support.
you think Trump is in the right by the defying the courts? The vast majority of people do not support this - several recent polls have shown that even majorities of Republicans think Trump should follow federal court rulings even if he does not agree. This is is not about border security or the moral implications of deporting people. It's about breaking the law and threatening the bedrock principles of being an American.
I don’t think he’s defying the courts.
The courts told him to facilitate the return of Garcia. To this point he has not. That is defying the courts!
What the courts told trump to do is a complicated matter. Even if Trump is defying the courts, it's not a clean case and public opinion (and honestly my opinion too) is that someone like Garcia should be deported one way or another, just preferably in a way that doesn't shaft our legal system.
That's a tough line to walk. Like do you see AOC going up and saying "Yes fine we should deport Garcia but bring him back first so he can have a 15 minute hearing and then we'll deport him to a less horrible place"?
Doesn't exactly roll of the tongue.
This exactly.
Your conclusion that Garcia should be deported even before he has a hearing is based on what? Perhaps we will so conclude after hearing the evidence. However, he appears to have been living a peaceful and productive life since 2019. He has not been arrested for any crimes and has legally been working. The claim that he is a gang member comes from an allegation by Trump and one police officer who said that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and shirt that many gang members wear. Trump tends to make such allegations against many immigrants without citing any evidence and that Bulls hat and shirt observation is laughable. Even if evidence emerges that warrant his deportation that is quite different than sending him to prison for an indefinite term. If the Trump administration has evidence against him they should not fear giving him the hearing that he is entitled to.
I'm curious why you think he's not facilitating the return. What is your evidence that he's not? As the Supreme Court explained, the lower court went too far in trying to command him.
If he made a brief request to El Salvador to return him and they said no, that should be a sufficient attempt at facilitating it.
I mean, it's all part of the mess right? I'm not qualified to determine if simply the act of not asking for him back counts as defiance. But it's pretty clear he hasn't initiated any operation to get him back. We've seen people meet with him, so he's not lost and he's on friendly terms with Bukele who he is directly paying to house Garcia. He could just say, "Give me back that one dude or I won't pay to house him"
The piece makes the mistake of conflating "Democratic Party focus" and "media coverage." I don't see how anyone other than Van Hollen is focused on Garcia at all. In fact, I think the silence from Democratic leadership is notable. The problem is that the Democratic leadership isn't really doing much of ANYTHING. They aren't trying to rally voters around any of the possible issues - they could pick Tariffs, the economy, DOGE, Signalgate, or Garcia. But they haven't done any of that. I do think that the media is very focused on Garcia, but AG Sulzberger is not Chuck Schumer.
What you have to understand is that the media is the actual Democratic party leadership!
And the media ignoramus spouts their wisdom of the current media landscape. So smart. So brilliant. So bad it's not even wrong, just irrelevant.
Sorry, I don't understand what this means. Are you talking about Nate? He's hardly a media ignoramus. Or was this to me? Presumably not, since I'm just stating the "Indigo Blob" theory / Moldbug's Cathedral and my comment was not about the media, but how the Democratic party acts. In any case, you should explain.
“But part of what you’re counting on me for — and in some cases, even paying me for — is weighing in on high-stakes political controversies even when the response is sure to piss off half the Silver Bulletin reader base.”
I don't think you understand your audience in fullness. What at least a very large segment of your audience counts on you for is for you to not be a pundit, to not engage the kind of speculation we can easily get anywhere else. We (this large segment of your audience) want you to stick to the data and value-neutral horse race discussion, telling us what the results are and how you collected the data. We're not dumb, passive normies: we can make our own judgements for ourselves on how we interpret that data. “Weighing in on high-stakes political controversies” is not only not part of what we count on you for, it actively undermines the integrity of the thing we do count on you for.
Obviously the data journalism is the biggest initial draw, but substack let's the direction go both ways. I like Nate's voice and information especially on sensitive topics precisely because he earned my respect via data journalism.
Sure, some of the audience feels like that. But many of us don't.
In that case, couldn't the people who don't want the punditry just not read these articles? Whereas if he doesn't publish them, what would the people who want the punditry do?
As I said, for some of us the existence of the punditry articles undermines the integrity of the data work. It's not just a case of not reading them.
There's also an opportunity cost. If a large proportion of the articles are punditry, it's a much less interesting proposition.
And let's not pretend there's any shortage of punditry available on the internet, both paid-for and free.
There's a huge shortage of punditry written by people of Nate's caliber. Most of it is crap. Nate's is not.
And it cannot possibly undermine the integrity of the data work - this is just an insult to Nate.
That claim does not make any sense. You think he can't have his own views on politics and still do accurate data analysis? You know that he has his own views whether he writes about them or not, so why does writing about them matter?
I don't know about you, but I'm here for the punditry. I do want him to weigh in on these controversies.
Nate's punditry has always been absolutely wrong in the past: the most famous time was when he punditted for hours about how it was impossible for Trump to win the nomination, let alone the election. Sigh. Here he goes again, spilling out his white privilege all over the airwaves. Bletch.
Trump broke the law, continues to break the law and threatens to break the law in the future.
But we should ignore it because people think it's okay to send dehumanized immigrants to concentration camps.
NEVER AGAIN.
Anyone who talks about "white privilege" can safely be disregarded.
I think it's really racist to make an issue of Nate's race, as though you can judge his politicial opinions based on his race. You should apologize for being racist against Nate.
Don't be racist. Racism is wrong.
And regarding Trump, there is no evidence that he broke the law or continues to break it. That's just not true.
Indeed they can. Bye, bigot, bye-bye. Hope your outrage feeds your stroke.
Can what?
I think a lot of my fellow Dems still fail to understand how stories about Trump being a rogue actor uncontrolled by checks and balances actually reinforce a positive opinion of him in some circles.
Many voters opinion of Trump is "He's an asshole, but he's a business man not a politician and is willing to do what it takes to get things done. When stories about how Trump is an asshole disobeying the courts dominate the news, it reinforces both sides of that image (even if you just point out he's an asshole, the idea that he gets things done is inextricably linked to him being an asshole in their minds, so it makes them incorrectly assume he is getting more done). Tariffs were the perfect anti-Trump story because it made it undeniable that he is a fool with no grasp of global markets or the modern world economy. It completely undermined his elevator pitch rather than reinforcing it.
Standing up for people who were lawlessly kidnapped and shipped to a foreign country IS important, so it's not like we shouldn't care, it just shouldn't be the public facing above the fold headline. The headline is Trump is tanking every aspect of the country.
Abrego Garcia was the test case, not bc he’s most the sympathetic figure but bc this is the one where the Trump admin admitted to breaking the law by sending him to El Salvador. He was not in the country illegally at the time of his removal, as he had a form of legal protection. They also are doing nothing to “facilitate” his return, which is an action verb as stated in the 4th Circuit opinion, and posting on social media that he is “never coming back”. They are actively defying a Supreme Court by doing nothing. We don’t always get to pick the fights but the Trump admin ignoring several court orders is a fight we have to have, whether it helps us win the next election or not. Democrats refusing to talk about issues that don’t poll well for them means Republicans get to define it. Thats part of the reason we lost.
"He was not in the country illegally at the time of his removal, as he had a form of legal protection"
No. He was deportable. Just not to El Salvador.
Great and where was he sent to? His removal to El Salvador was illegal as the Supreme Court agreed. A withholding of removal status allows you to get a work permit from DHS and work legally in the United States. which Garcia had and checked in with DHS regularly since 2019, including during Trumps first term. A work permit is a form of legal protection. its not the strongest, but it is a form of legal protection. Saying "hes an illegal immigrant" is not accurate.
No, he was deportable. He had a deportation order.
A work permit from DHS allowed him to work in the US legally at the time of his removal. The only way to revoke that would be to have a judge remove his status. The Supreme Court stated verbatim his removal was illegal. Are you saying you know more than the Supreme Court about US law?
It was illegal because he was deported to El Salvador. He could have been legally deported anywhere else. Look at the Supreme Court order.
Great, so its irrelevant then because he was in fact deported to El Salvador.
Here's the excerpt from the Supreme Court order:
"The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal."
"For its part, the
Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further
steps."
What steps has the Trump taken to "facilitate" his removal? They are posting on the offical WH account that Garcia is "never coming back." They have admitted to taking no action in court, which shows they have already defied the order by doing nothing and making it clear they will do nothing in good faith.
In your big cope paragraph — you say that Dems believe they will win hearts because when they expose truthful info? Garcia is a perfect example of them trying to score points by lying about facts. He is not only a court-determined MS-13 gang member, he was also held to be deportable at an earlier hearing. This article leaves that due process hearing out. A SECOND due process hearing allowed him to be withheld from going to ONLY El Salvador because he is in fact a gang member who would have been threatened by his RIVAL gang members. The error the Trump Admin made was sending him to El Salvador (his home country where there is no longer a rival gang threat) and not to someplace arbitrary country like Burma, which would have been legally correct. Every single MSM news outlet but Fox — refuses to report these facts. Including that he is a wife beater with 2 orders of protection against him, was investigated by state and Feds for gang activities AND human trafficking. He is the father of only one child and the father of other two has gone on record that he is violent and his 2 children are at risk. But no one knows this because— and I say this as a former 40+. Year Democrat —Democrats Lie. I predicted the Trump win months before this newsletter would admit it. But you all should keep going (and you are not bi-partisan) because Dems will lose again. And again and again. Thank God for that. This fight over Garcia is the perfect reason why they deserved to lose.
"He is not only a court-determined MS-13 gang member, he was also held to be deportable at an earlier hearing"
Misleading. Those were bond hearings in immigration courts. Those courts take the government's claims at face value, and in this case it would require the defendant to demonstrate positively they're not in MS-13, rather than the government to prove their contention beyond a reasonable doubt.
"A SECOND due process hearing allowed him to be withheld from going to ONLY El Salvador because he is in fact a gang member who would have been threatened by his RIVAL gang members."
No. Cut out "is in fact a gang member who" and "his RIVAL" and you're correct. The court's determination that he was in danger from gang members in El Salvador didn't rely on his being in a gang. It had to do with his experience from many years before when he was living in El Salvador as a minor... and was being threatened by gang members.
"The error the Trump Admin made was sending him to El Salvador (his home country where there is no longer a rival gang threat) and not to someplace arbitrary country like Burma, which would have been legally correct."
This is, as far as I know, correct. And given how easy it would be for Trump to bring him back and then immediately deport him somewhere else, the fact that he hasn't done this to comply with the courts should be disturbing.
"Including that he is a wife beater with 2 orders of protection against him"
I know of at least one civil protection order against him, wouldn't be surprised if there were 2.
"was investigated by state and Feds for gang activities AND human trafficking"
Misleading, at best. He wasn't investigated for a crime. Given the clothes he was wearing, his tattoos, and the (dubious) account of an informant, he was suspected of being a gang member. This is what was used against him at his hearings in immigration court.
Human trafficking: in 2022, Abrego Garcia was pulled over in a vehicle with 8 other people. His license was expired. Abrego Garcia said they were traveling for a construction job. Given the fact that he had alleged ties with MS-13 (from the above), and given that there was no luggage in the vehicle, state authorities suspected human trafficking and referred it to ICE. Neither took any further action.
"the father of other two has gone on record that he is violent and his 2 children are at risk"
I'll admit I haven't heard this. Source?
> "given how easy it would be for Trump to bring him back and then immediately deport him somewhere else, the fact that he hasn't done this to comply with the courts should be disturbing."
Given the fact that he hasn't done that, it would appear that it's not so easy for him to bring him back.
I would assume he grudgingly asked El Salvador for him back, and El Salvador, knowing what Trump actually wanted, said No.
In that situation, there is nothing that the president or courts can do. El Salvador won't release him.
Does the Trump Administration care about men who abuse women? We just invited Conor McGregor, a litigated rapist, to the WH and gave Mel Gibson, a convicted domestic batterer, his guns back. The Trump Admin has proven over and over that they will use abuse of women only when it helps their political narrative. Also ABC News already put out a story about the DV allegations so you are just not being truthful in your statement.
Thank you for this. I did not know most of this.
That guy's actually just lying, though. The claims of gang membership had nothing to do with him being granted withholding of removal in the actual deportation proceedings (that stuff about 'rivals' he said) because they were not mentioned in those deportation proceedings - they were exclusively mentioned in the bond proceedings, which have a much lower burden of proof.
He was denied bond because ICE claimed he was a gang member, yes. That isn't proof of fact that he was a gang member, though, any more than someone being denied bond because they're considered a flight risk is proof that they did intend to flee the country, or denying bond to a murder defendant because the crime is violent is proof that they committed the murder.
Burden of proof is on the defendant in bond proceedings, and I'm not sure how one would even prove the negative there ("there is no way i could possibly be a gang member"). If the prosecution hadn't abandoned that assertion in later proceedings, that'd be a different story.
First, be careful with what you use ChatGPT for. 27 minutes sounds reasonable, but it’s a prediction engine, and it’s very good at making up plausible-sounding answers to things it has no idea about, so you can’t cite it as a source. That number may be random for all we know.
Secondly, the Garcia case concerns me, not because of the specifics of the case, but for the principle of the matter. I remember Rand Paul filibustering to demand the answer to: “Can an American sitting at a cafe in Bowling Green be killed by a drone strike”, which left a lasting impression on me that I still remember it to this day. I’d like for democrats to focus on pressing the administration as to if an American citizen can be deported to El Salvador and if the administration can then refuse a court order to release them. What happened to Garcia is, at the very least, a miscarriage of justice and it’s actively good to try to secure his return pending the conclusion of his court proceedings, but people aren’t dumb, Trump has openly said that he’s considering sending citizens there. This is a principle they could stand on fight on, they just haven’t and have focused on trying to make Garcia a martyr, which, yeah, isn’t going to breach the Trump echo chamber.
I truly haven’t seen any democratic figure or even online liberals trying to make him a martyr. Chris Van Hollen had stated multiple times, including on Fox News he isn’t advocating for the man, he’s advocating for his rights and the implication it has for the rest of the country.
When I say “make him a martyr” I mean putting focus on his specific case, extolling his virtues, appealing to the (manifest) unfairness. The problem is that if counterfactuals exist that undermine the hagiography (e.g. Van Hollen saying “He’s traumatised and separated from his wife and autistic child” vs the unpursued DV accusation for example) the MAGA group is going to cling to those counterfactuals to justify his treatment rather than engaging with the principle of the matter (i.e. “He’s a gang member, who cares he he gets screwed, he deserves it”). They should keep working to get Garcia justice, but that is maybe not the persuasive electoral argument whereas, at least to my mind, “Trump thinks he can deport you for any reason and leave you locked up in a foreign country without trial” might be the better principle to die on the hill of and has the most upside if you can get the administration to disavow. It lets you fight the more sympathetic case without having to wait for the better test case
Agree on that point, we should not really argue on whether he’s a good person or not. I have seen a few people say he’s an innocent person (which is not a sound claim), but I have also seen a lot of people arguing that his character is irrelevant, he was never charged or convicted of a crime and this is about the precedent it sets and the implications of Trump defying the courts rather than Garcia himself. I have had conversations with a few MAGAs about this and reiterating that this could happen to a US citizen seemed to be the most persuasive. That you wouldn’t be able to prove you’re a citizen if you just get shipped on a plane. and I actually think focusing on the fact that he’s now calling the Supreme Court “radical left” bc they ruled against him breaking the law is also persuasive - large swaths of people think Trump should obey court orders. I think ignoring it to talk about tariffs is insanely stupid.
Concur, there’s going to be a time to focus on tariffs, but doing it now when the issue is “paused” is just going to numb people to it well before an election.
If, in 2026/2028 both issues are salient that’s the time to play this game of “what should the messaging be”. Right now, I think there’s time to pick principles.
But... the guy has a deportation order! He could have legally been deported anywhere but El Salvador! And he's in another country, so how can a court order him back?
I think it's insanely stupid to make an issue of this case, where a guy who clearly should have been deported, and is undisputely an ILLEGAL, got deported to the wrong country.
It is never good politics to support ILLEGALS. No quarter to those who spit on this country's laws and invade it.
And let's be real - you think Obama or Biden never accidentally deported a citizen? It has happened. There have been lawsuits over it.
What if we had some kind of document you could show to prove you're a citizen?
and how would you do that if you get shipped out of the country before the government verifies it through the courts? We are relying on the good faith of ICE agents to check everyone's passports before they put people on planes? At best, you are allowing ICE to detain US Citizens with no probable cause and asking them to prove citizenship to get out. This just happened with a US citizen in Florida who did not speak English. That goes against the 5th amendment pretty clearly.
There does need to be some procedure for declaring that you are a citizen, as well as a truly, truly brutal and barbaric punishment for those who abuse the process when they're not in fact a citizen.
You can't have one without the other. It's not fair. Otherwise illegals will abuse the process and falsely claim they are citizens just to slow things down. We need to strike fear in their hearts.
I propose everyone deported has the opportunity to sign a form stating, under penalty of perjury, that they are a citizen, and if they're not, they authorize the government to torture them or do anything it wants to them for the rest of their life.
If they sign it, their claim gets adjudicated. If it turns out that they committed perjury and lied, and are not a citizen, then we can do anything we want with the scumbag, slavery, forced labor, firing squad, brutal torture, seize all their property, whatever.
> "if an American citizen can be deported to El Salvador and if the administration can then refuse a court order to release them"
Well, hold on. If someone is deported to El Salvador, the administration does not have the ability to release him, because he is then in El Salvador's hands and it's El Salvador's decision what to do. The court has no jurisdiction over El Salvador.
Okay, but you see how this is a problem right? Let's say that in the middle of the night they throw you onto a plane and deport you to El Salvador over a clerical error. If the Administration then gets to shrug and say "oops, nothing we can do anymore", you've been deprived of due process rights, you're deprived of your habeas corpus rights, you're deprived of your right to a trial before your peers and the government faces no consequences for doing this and no obligation to remedy it because "oh, they're in a different country, nothing we can do to bring them back"... You could have a habeas petition so compelling that it would succeed in securing your release before every court in the country, but if you're in a foreign country, this administration seems to think that it can just shrug and say "oh, too bad, we acknowledge he shouldn't have been sent there, but we refuse to take any action to attempt to secure his release"
That's why we need to have the fight now to *prevent* them from depriving others of their rights like Garcia has been rather than waiting for them to abuse due process further.
Another example of a similar problem - say they send in special forces to kill you.
It's not possible to raise the dead, so you've been deprived of all rights and it can't be remedied. The administration can shrug and say "oops, nothing we can do, he's dead." A court can't order the dead raised, and even if they did, that order can't be obeyed.
And the government faces no consequences, due to pardons and presidential immunity.
I'm not sure what the "fight" would be or how you want to prevent it. There doesn't seem to be a way of stopping it that doesn't create worse problems. What is your actual proposal to change the system to prevent that?
I’m sorry, you’ve lost the plot. I agree that sending in special forces to kill people is wrong without an active article of war authorized by Congress. All you’ve done is take my example and made it worse, which is a distinction without a difference for what we’re talking about. A is bad, B is bad too, both should be prevented. And if that did happen there would be investigations, calls for resignations, and your family COULD sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Which isn’t a remedy, but your example emphasises even further the necessity of preventing the government from abridging your rights *BEFORE* they actually do.
Obviously the solution is putting political and legal pressure on the executive to return Garcia and disavow any claim of authority to repeat what they did to him or expand their program to citizens as they’ve been threatening. Also, courts have ordered prior administrations to facilitate the return of people deported to foreign countries before and the federal government has previously made efforts to do so and has been successful (especially when working with allies, like El Salvador is). If the issue was that El Salvador was stonewalling us, that would be one thing, instead Trump sits beaming as their President says that he won’t return a wrongfully deported person to the country. The issue isn’t that the government hasn’t been successful in returning Garcia, it’s that it hasn’t even tried.
Trump cannot be allowed to use deportations to foreign states, especially of American Nationals, as a backdoor to deprive people of rights they would have in America. Legally, he should be forbidden from deporting people without providing them with due process (which is something the SCOTUS already ordered) and if he refuses, he should be impeached and removed from office. If the Congress won’t do that we go to the ballot box and fight to elect people that will. Heaven forbid we have to go farther than that
Did I really make your example worse? Personally, I'd rather be killed than deported to an El Salvador prison where I'd likely be raped and tortured. But anyway.
Interesting about the FTCA. Does that not apply in this situation? Seems like he or his family would have a cause of action against the government. Possibly a 1983 claim?
Clearly what's actually going on is that Trump has outfoxed the courts by asking El Salvador for Garcia's return, with the tacit understanding that he has to ask but doesn't really want Garcia returned.
This clever move outfoxed the courts and the liberals, because the courts are now stymied. They can't order Trump to put pressure on El Salvador, because that's getting into foreign policy, violating separation of powers. They can, maybe, order him to ask, but asking is futile because of that tacit understanding.
Not only that, but the guy is extremely unsympathetic, making it hard for anyone to defend him, and he's an illegal with a deportation order, making it questionable whether he has the same rights as citizens.
10/10 A++ politics, would elect him again. I know you disagree, but you have to at least admire the political skill and the way he outfoxed his foes. This is art.
As far as your proposed "solutions," political pressure and impeachment are not going to work - clearly the political will isn't there and he is not getting impeached over this, let alone removed. That leaves legal pressure - can you elaborate on what you're envisioning?
The other thing is that it's not clear to me that Garcia's due process rights were actually violated. If he had been deported 50 miles away to Guatemala, there'd be no issue, right? So clearly what we need is a second prison in Guatemela, to solve this problem. But given that he could have legally been deported to Guatemela, and he's now been deported to El Salvador, how have his due process rights been denied? He went through the proper process. His right to not be deported to El Salvador, assuming he has such a right, was violated, but that's a substantive right.
Okay, let me just put a few things out there.
1) The ends can NEVER justify bad means. I don’t care if you feel that Garcia is a monster who should be deported, if Trump can circumvent the rule of law to win with Garcia, he can do the same thing with you or I. I don’t admire Trump’s political skill, because its not about winning for me, its about doing the right thing, its about securing liberty, and Trump isn’t. Trump is excellent at scoring political points, but political points are meaningless or worse if it’s accompanied with backsliding of things like habeas rights and due process.
2) Yes, Garcia’s due process rights were violated. He was sent to the one country that the government was told they weren’t allowed to send him to. Maybe removing him to Guatemala would be legal, but he wasn’t removed to Guatemala, he was removed to El Salvador without the government prevailing in a termination of withholding from removal status hearing. That’s a dramatic failure of effective process. Further, most of the deportees (perhaps all in the first batch) were not given sufficient time to challenge the determinations of their gang membership in court, which is, in and of itself, a due process violation. This seems to have been done so that Trump could deport them before the legality of these deportations could be challenged in court. Then, the administration, not having moved fast enough, had to ignore a court order to turn the planes around (while the planes were over international airspace, the people directing the plains were still under the jurisdiction of American courts). To me this looks like a concerted effort to keep political enemies from due process until it was too late. That’s the playbook we saw with Garcia for sure.
3) Your logic of “oh well what’s your better solution then” is absurd and seems to give the federal executive free reign to act lawlessly as long as there’s not a way to expressly stop them. As I said the courts should stop any further deportations without the deportee receiving the ability to challenge that status in court (Which the SCOTUS has ordered). They should also use their discovery powers to peer into internal administration communications ascertain what efforts have been made to recover Garcia and hold those who decided not to work to bring him back and those who have contravened a court order to inform the court of said steps taken in contempt, including, if necessary, jail time
4) I see why the other person you were arguing with found this tiresome. If you don’t value your rights enough to see the dangers of letting an administration trample others’ rights, I have nothing to say to you. It seems that you value immediate victory in the political arena more than protecting civil liberties. If this were Obama or Biden the GOP would suddenly rediscover the importance of due process and it’s that inconsistency that kills me.
Nate is probably correct that focusing on Garcia won’t move the polls much in the short term. However, virtually any short term poll movement will be swamped in the medium term by the state of the economy.
Democrats need to avoid toxic stances, eg Biden’s impotent response to chaos at the border and support for gender dysphoric men playing women’s sports. They need the economy to break against Trump. Nothing else matters much.
While I don't think you're exactly wrong, I think that the violation to due process is important enough that it makes sense to put a lot of pressure on even if it's not an issue that as many people in the country care about. I also think that if the Abrego Garcia case hadn't been pursued as vigorously by Democrats, there was a good chance they'd get backlash from progressives who have been frustrated that they're not doing enough.
I also think there's an argument that the tariffs issue will inevitably come back around as it starts to materially impact Americans. Abrego Garcia may be distracting people from that issue right now, but the consequences of a financial downturn can never really stay out of the public consciousness for very long.
While I agree with you, part of Nate‘s point is that most people on both sides of the aisle care a lot less about due process than you might think. Much of the left certainly decided not to care about it in the me-too era.
Not really counter to my point, which is basically that even if the public doesn't care about it right now, it's still very important, and if it escalated enough the public would eventually care about it a lot, in which case it would be better they put in the work now. And even if the left is inconsistent about their love for due process (not sure I exactly agree with this part of your point, but not worth arguing about), they definitely care about this particular case.
On the merits, I 100% agree with you. But due process can only be enforced by the courts and the government, not the public. My point (and I think Nate’s point too, but I don’t want to put words in his mouth) is that the only thing that can actually stop Trump is winning elections, and Abrego Garcia is not a good test case in that field.
What I'm kind of responding to is the implication that the democrats (who are part of the government, if a minority) should stop harping on this because it won't sway public opinion, and I'm just saying that other factors are more important in this case than whether it (immediately) impacts public opinion. Tariffs aren't going anywhere, that issue is going to come back around as the economic impacts are felt.
And I do think they would pay a huge enthusiasm cost on the left if they didn't seem to give a damn about this kind of issue. If we were close to an election, I'd say scoring immediate short term points in the centre matters more than that, but it's still early 2025, so they can afford to look longer term.
I think them harping on it makes them look bad and hurts them in the long term by draining voters. Which is Trump's whole point here.
This is rope-a-dope - Trump goaded them into defending an illegal gangster with a deportation order who got deported to the wrong country.
This just enhances the public's (accurate) image of the left as the party that cares more about illegals and lazy bums than hard-working American citizens.
The left is definitely inconsistent about that - it is the Trump administration that fought for due process for people accused of sexual assault on college campuses, and Biden who reversed that, for instance.
As for this particular case, I think only the most extreme progressives and leftists care about it. Most people who vote Democratic don't like gangsters and illegals either.
> "I also think that if the Abrego Garcia case hadn't been pursued as vigorously by Democrats, there was a good chance they'd get backlash from progressives who have been frustrated that they're not doing enough."
You say that like it's a bad thing.
For real, I think backlash from progressives would help the Democrats politically. They badly need a Sister Soljah moment.
And opposing progessives is good as far as policy and ethics, as well, but that's just my view.
I don't think the issue is about "Abrego Garcia" at all.
The issue is 261 people were picked up off the streets in America and sent to a prison in a foreign country and left there to rot.
They have no charges, no convictions, no sentences, they are just gone - disappeared.
They can contact no one, not family, not attorneys, and the administration claims that US courts have no no jurisdiction.
And both Trump and Rubio who set the deal up (check the video) said they could use this for U.S. citizens as well.
This also isn't deportation, we are paying a foreign government to keep people in prison and they claim they are due no legal rights, and there is no recourse.
This isn't about some being, or not being a gang member, it is about being put outside of all judicial review and left in a hellhole prison to rot.
That's the issue. I do appreciate that people's attention span is limited, but politics does work on multiple fronts, some people will resonate with an economic story, some will resonate with a rights story.
And while only talking about democracy did not win the day in November, it isn't that people didn't hear it. They just did not really see it in Trump's first term (pre election), and so imaged it wouldn't matter. And so now that it does, and they are going full authoritarian, it would be good to point it out.
While also pointing out you can think about it as the economy tanks.
agree here. its a little harder to deny there is no threat to democracy/our republic when it is actively happening, especially when Trump is now attacking his own Supreme Court and at least one Republican Congress members has stated openly she is afraid of Trump's retribution. During the election, it was an abstract concept
How is it not deportation?
These are illegals, correct? People with deportation orders?
I feel like the best approach on the "immigration" vs "economy" messaging is neither to retreat nor take the bait. Hit and pivot.
"It's this kind of lawless and haphazard enforcement, that is so emblematic of Trump's sloppy approach to the economy that is taking us into an unending nosedive. Small business and local manufacturing..."
"Haphazard" and "sloppy" is subtly implying that Trump's incompetence might also pose a problem for effectively enforcing immigration, not just being "too bold" and lawless. And then it takes it directly pivots to the economy. This idea of an "unending" nosedive also implies "this guy has to stop and change", which is what you hope he will do on his immigration issues as well.
No, you don't understand, you can't have a nuanced, clever, moderate approach to this that might actually work! You have to pick an extreme side and fight for it and attack the other side!