Conservaitve National Review columnist Jeffrey Blehar, who has been writing critically of President Donald Trump's trade wars, took a break from that topic on Tuesday to refocus his attention on Trump's defiance of court orders demanding that his administration facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador.
Blehar, who is normally hawkish on the issue of immigration, nonetheless found himself unnerved that Trump has now blown off more than one court order, including an order from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The writer called it "the latest and most perfectly emblematic example of the new Trump administration’s willingness to test the law well past its limits and do so by demonstrating gleefully naked contempt for it."
Despite the High Court's demand to "facilitate" the return of García, the "administration refused, claiming, on stunningly disingenuous logic, that because Ábrego García had been dumped quickly into El Salvador, he was now beyond American jurisdiction," said the columnist.
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Blehar then noted that the Trump administration feels free to defy the law openly because it believes Americans are on its side. The columnist used an example from an Oval Office press availability and photo-op on Monday, in which top Trump aide Stephen Miller implied García was a bad person and getting rid of him made the U.S. safer.
It isn't the first time for "the casual disregard for protocol," wrote Blehar. He walked through a list of administration flubs such as: "other bungled deportations and most flagrantly with Trump’s openly lawless decision, ten days ago, to delay closing TikTok in direct contravention of the black letter of a bill voted for by Congress and signed into law by his predecessor."
The writer alleged that the strategy appears to have been adopted from Silicon Valley's motto of "move fast and break things." But instead of a Twitter blackout, lives are at risk.
"What makes [Stephen] Miller’s maximalist theory of executive power scary is that it is analytical rather than emotional: His insight is not that presidential power should be wielded semi-autocratically but that it can be. And he is determined to test the outermost limits of that power, confident as he is that — having survived two impeachments and succeeded at reelection — the president is functionally beyond the reach of both the law and the demos itself."
He closed by cautioning, "A test of the rule of law is coming. It is not enough to write about this phenomenon with clinical detachment; it must be opposed. If not, I assure you that the spirits unleashed by Trump and Miller, perhaps seemingly innocuous now, will eventually consume us all. I’m not here to persuade you. I’m here to warn you. Until next week."
