President Donald Trump is only pretending not to understand the Constitution, wrote Jesselyn Radack for Salon in an analysis published Tuesday — so that he can twist and reinterpret our laws to make political opponents and disfavored groups into a military enemy of the state.
The president has drawn fire for a recent interview in which he claimed he doesn't know whether he is required to uphold the Constitution. But his words aren't an accident, Radack argued — he's been laying the groundwork to reshape our rights with "words of war" since day one.
For instance, she wrote, "On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order (which he mistakenly thinks is an unreviewable decree) declaring an emergency at the U.S. southern border. That way his brain trust could contemplate the Insurrection Act as a possible response to immigration, which would let him deploy the military to enforce laws on U.S. soil.
"Trump also invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify sending 137 of 261 alleged Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvadoran gulag. He is now reportedly looking into whether his administration can label suspected gang and cartel members inside the U.S. as 'enemy combatants.'"
He's gone even further than that, Radack noted, and "declared that deportees are 'terrorists' and that Tren de Aragua is a 'foreign terrorist organization' akin to the Islamic State and Boko Haram."
All of this has a simple purpose, she wrote: when presidents are in a period of war or invasion, their actions become emergency powers and are less reviewable by the normal checks and balances. It's why when Russia invaded Ukraine, that country had to suspend elections — which Trump and other right-wingers have used to suggest Ukraine isn't a democracy.
"The problem with all this Hegsethian warrior-speak is that we are not in a declared war or under a military invasion," Radack wrote. "Moreover, presidents and agency heads don’t have the power to just proclaim one. Yet most of Trump’s more controversial executive actions – especially when it comes to immigration – require the U.S. to be on wartime footing because, outside of that dire context, they would be illegal, unconstitutional, or both. Even during wartime, things like kidnapping and extraordinary rendition violate U.S. law, the Geneva Conventions, and other international humanitarian treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory."
His new rhetoric about rebuilding Alcatraz and shipping off dangerous criminals to foreign prisons, Radack wrote, is the natural next step of this authoritarian vision.
"I suspect that if he could, Trump would outsource our immigration machinery to places far worse than Gitmo, El Salvador and Rwanda, like Camp 14 in North Korea and Butyrka Prison in Russia," she concluded. "Bypassing immigration courts is not just a slippery slope, it’s a blind cliff dive into tyranny. Trump knows this better than anybody."
