With El Salvador, Trump has become exactly the tyrant the founders warned about | Opinion
In less than 100 days, and despite Republican control of all three branches of government, Donald Trump has careened through constitutional barriers at an astonishing pace — stretching the power of the presidency, usurping the lawmaking power of Congress and, now, boldly defying the Supreme Court. The only thing keeping us from a constitutional crisis is the obsequiousness of Republican congressional leaders and the forbearance of the Supreme Court. Don’t expect it to last.
How strange that these issues came to a head in a battle over an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador who is accused of membership in MS-13, a bloodthirsty foreign gang. But before you dismiss the case as irrelevant to you, consider the fact that the issues at hand are as old as our republic, indeed as old as the very idea of law.
The legal fig leaf Trump used to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to a brutal Salvadoran prison is a law from 1798 called the Enemy Aliens Act, signed by President John Adams after being passed by a Congress controlled by a political party so old it no longer exists.
The Declaration of Independence was barely over 20 years old then. You’ll remember that document from grade school, but you probably don’t know that it accuses a British tyrant of misruling America in exactly the same way Trump is.
“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
The document goes on to list King George’s many crimes that happen to exactly match Trump’s depredations. Among them:
- “Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” — Garcia was deported without even a hearing by a judge, let alone a jury.
- “Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” — Garcia was deported to a foreign nation based on a mere accusation never proved in court.
- “Abolishing the free System of English Laws” — Trump could only do those things by ignoring common law.
- Trump is as guilty as the tyrant King George of “abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.”
- They both are guilty of “declaring themselves invested with power to legislate.”
But Trump is not just the kind of lawless autocrat who inspired the American Revolution, the values of which formed the basis of our Constitution. He has ignored the very first civil right that is older than the Roman Empire, nearly as old as the Pyramids, as old as the idea of law itself. And that is the right to have the government’s case against you taken before a magistrate who must agree before your life is destroyed. That idea is in the code of Hammurabi from 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.
If Donald Trump can deport a man — in a case which the administration admitted was an “administrative error” — without the case against that man being heard in court, there is nothing to prevent him from using the same process to deport and imprison U.S. citizens without trial. Trump has even said that he is thinking about deporting American convicts to this same Salvadoran prison hellhole.
Stepping into this legal atrocity, the Republican-dominated and apparently unanimous Supreme Court has said Trump must reverse this action by “facilitating” Garcia’s return to the United States. On Monday, Trump and the president of El Salvador sat smugly in the Oval Office and announced that they would do no such thing.
That is the definition of a constitutional crisis. Now we wait for the court process to churn back up to the Supreme Court and the nine justices — six Republican appointees, three Democratic appointees — and see if they have the will to defend the most fundamental civil right of them all, one you previously could depend on even in the case of a traffic ticket.
Until then, it is a simple fact that Trump has revealed himself as just the kind of tyrant that our nation’s founders fought and died to overthrow.
This story was originally published April 16, 2025 at 9:51 AM with the headline "With El Salvador, Trump has become exactly the tyrant the founders warned about | Opinion."
