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The fully sourced, highly specific case for investigating Donald Trump for Treason—a federal criminal offense (18 U.S. Code § 2381) punishable by death—is in fact not complicated.

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Introduction

The Minutemen of the American Revolution had the Gadsden Flag. The Americans of the Donald Trump era—who like their forebears are doing all they can to achieve a lasting democracy in America, now have the No Kings Flag.

No Kings Day may well go down in history—and should arguably be celebrated in the future on every June 14, given that that’s Donald Trump’s birthday… and his birthday is a day that should be obliterated from America’s collective memory if at all possible.

While June and July already have several holidays, from Juneteenth to July 4, at least until Trump is gone from American life by peaceful, legal means it seems No Kings Day is worth its own celebration, as it’s less a remembrance of the past than a promise regarding America’s future. There’ll be no kings in America but the American people.

With all this in mind, I’ll say that what follows may be my favorite piece of curatorial journalism of all those I’ve ever done. It’s certainly the first one ever to actually make me happy.

I decided to try to find crowd photos of as many of the over 2,000 No Kings Protests as possible, not just the ones held in the U.S. but those held around the world on June 14, 2025.

That’s right: the photos below aren’t just from America but all over the globe. It’s hard to articulate what a historic moment No Kings Day was, but saying that it was a global celebration is probably a good start.

Compiling these photographs turned out to be a massive undertaking. For all that Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post hilariously claimed that only “thousands” showed up to the thousands of No Kings protests, it was, of course, millions. And that means that there were in fact so many protests that trying to find photographic evidence of them all is an impossibility. So my goal here was to at least find hundreds of protests that in total would at a minimum show hundreds of thousands of anti-Trump protesters.

I hope readers will understand why the repository below is only for Proof subscribers: while I of course only used photographs that had been made public, I certainly don’t want to risk any of the MAGAs who spent No Kings Day watching the saddest parade in American history (the birthday bash that Donald Trump threw for himself at the American taxpayer’s expense) deciding to harass any of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who appear along with their hometowns in the photographs below.

On the subject of The Saddest Parade in History, it’s the one that happened in D.C. as the nation was protesting Trump’s openly fascist agenda. Trump aimed to celebrate his birthday (a birthday that makes him about the age Joe Biden was when Mr. Trump began saying Biden was too old to be President of the United States) by spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and causing tens of millions in damage to Washington’s roads on a parade that was short in every way imaginable. It was short timewise and it was short in terms of its route, which was only 1,600 meters.

It was also lackluster in ways even I couldn’t have imagined beforehand. On Twitter and Bluesky I compiled some of the chatroom comments that were made during the event in (of all places) a conservative chatroom: the online site of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. You’ll truly be stunned at how universally Trump’s parade was panned.

But after all, why not? Below you can see a photo from the extremely scattershot and extremely slow-moving parade whose only intention, apparently, was to force soldiers to dress up in awkward period costumes for a would-be dictator. Certainly, the crowd was sparse (see image below) and the event itself so sluggish that many online were seen to wonder—in all earnestness—whether the same few tanks were being driven around the block several times to make the whole event seem more robust than it was.

As for the music? It wasn’t music at all but muzak—lyric-free almost-covers of well-known hits that had been carefully calibrated not to provoke civil lawsuits. Picture lots of unremarkable guitar solos. In fact, the music was so horrid that many online wondered if much of the $45 million Trump had demanded for his parade had instead been pocketed by him and/or his pals. It certainly wasn’t spent on any licensing fees.

Yes, the structure at the background of the bottom photo is the Presidential Viewing Stand; so in looking at the photo you are, in fact, looking at the very thickest part of the paltry crowd at Trump’s birthday bash. Even as his fans crowed online that the claimed attendance (apparently a White House-provided figure) was 200,000—if past is precedent, the White House was simply using a jazzed-up version of the number of meaningless digital RSVPs as an attendance quote—observers, including this author, suspect that the total number of attendees was likely in the thousands only. (And if this is to be believed, which is a mystery as yet unsolved, some of those in attendance may have been paid as seat-fillers; certainly, Donald Trump loves to secretly do what he has long accused his political opponents of doing, and he continues to falsely say that Democrats pay protesters when in fact he’s the only U.S. politician who has been caught doing so in recent years.)

And it’s not just me saying all this. Trump’s parade has been panned, and to a possibly historic degree. Amidst a tide of public criticism, there are those who genuinely feel that a single epic fail by the President of the United States—with respect to a televised pageant, no less, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be his forte—could actually (not joking) hurt America’s standing in the world. Yes, the parade was that putrid.

Even Trump’s son Barron wanted nothing at all to do with his dad’s birthday bash.

And apparently few D.C. Republicans wanted to go. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R-FL) was even, hilariously, caught yawning as one of the parade’s least impressive vehicles went by.

By contrast, as someone born in 1976 I think I can safely say that I’ve never seen so many large, enthusiastic, diverse, festive, and truly dynamic protests across America as we saw on No Kings Day. And there were virtually no reports of property damage or arrests, despite some sinister far-right LEO folks seemingly hoping there would be.

Sidebar: Almost All the No Kings Day Violence Was Far-Right Violence

Thankfully, there was almost no violence anywhere on No Kings Day.

But what violence there was came from Trump supporters—the opposite phenomenon, of course, from what these very same people had assured themselves, one another, far-right media, and the nation at large was going to be the case. It was another example of the MAGA mantra that reads as follows (say it with me, now): “Every accusation is a confession.”

In Tennessee, a right-winger was arrested and charged after brandishing a gun at No Kings Day protesters. In Utah, a man was accidentally shot and killed when security personnel were forced to open fire at a right-winger clearly lunging for a rifle to shoot protesters with. In California, security footage showed a right-winger attacking a protester who had an “8647” sign (a term that means no more than firing someone from a job or removing them from a role) and ripping the said sign up; the footage quickly went viral. In Florida, someone in The Villages coordinated an assault on protesters with high-velocity water (yes, odd as it may seem, any sort of water cannon, even a sprinkler system, constitutes an assault and is at least distantly reminiscent of the brutalities of the Civil Rights Era). In Virginia, a right-wing man intentionally drove his SUV into the crowd in an apparent attempt to reproduce the 2017 Unite the Right Rally murder and attempted murders. And the exact same thing happened in Riverside, California, resulting in a woman being in a coma. In another viral video, a far-right-wing driver “rolled coal”—sprayed heavy black exhaust from his pick-up truck—on a long line of unsuspecting No Kings Day protesters from a distance of a few feet. That too is a crime (one the perpetrator was so proud of that he had a friend in a trailing vehicle film it so it could be uploaded and enjoyed by their fellow MAGAs).

{Update: The incident, which occurred in Ontario, California, resulted in the unhinged man—who, quite concerningly, also had a firearm in his truck—getting arrested for Reckless Driving. It turns out that he made so many passes of the protesters to spray them with toxic exhaust that the local police had ample time to apprehend and arrest him and impound his vehicle.}

And of course there’s the now-confirmed Minnesota right-winger who posed as a police officer in order to assassinate a Democratic politician and their spouse and nearly kill another Democratic politician and their spouse. The man had No Kings Day flyers in his car and left behind a hit-list that confirmed he was looking to kill people who supported the panoply of policy items linked to No Kings Day and the U.S. left.

{Update: The suspected assassin, Vance Boelter, has thankfully been arrested in Minnesota.}

As discussed more in the Coda to this report—see infra—major-media coverage of No Kings Day has been surprisingly paltry on the day after it. Troublingly, one of the key impacts of this has been to erase so much of the far-right terrorism that intermittently marred an otherwise peaceful day.

Here’s one more shot of Trump’s micro-sized “parade,” just for good measure. Keep the image below in mind as you read the rest of this lengthy photojournalistic report.

And just to cleanse your palate, now, here’s a small sample of my favorite No Kings Day photographs (with the full photo archive below the subscriber fold a bit further down):

Pittsburgh, PA

Boise, ID

Paris, France

Ocean Beach (San Francisco), CA

St. Paul, MN

Cincinnati, OH

St. Louis, MO

Palm Springs, CA

As great as these photographs are, most of my favorites remain below the fold (see the beginning of the report proper). There are over two hundred more photographs infra, including ones from abroad, ones with celebrities, ones from places you would never expect an anti-Trump crowd of any kind to form, ones with unusual people and some genuinely hilarious signs… it’s truly a photo album the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

One caveat: almost all of these protests are even bigger than they appear in the photos. For many of the still images below, I’ve also seen the video versions, and they pan the crowd in a way that underscores the incapacity of any one photograph to capture the whole of an event. But even so, the size of the part(s) we’re able to see are shocking.

I sincerely hope you’ll find the hundreds of photographs below as jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring as I do. They sent a clear message that resonates, I think, deep within the heart of every American who feels anxiety but also resolve in the face of tyranny: you’re not alone.

{Note: Besides the obviously fun thing to do with the photographs below—look at the signs, as some of them are hilarious, and many location-specific—another fun game you can play with these photos is to try to spot the celebrities. Some are hard to find, but there are plenty there. They’re of course no more important than anyone else at these protests, but that’s sort of the point: the way even well-known Americans just blended into larger crowds on No Kings Day is a testament to the fact that we really are one people, the majority of us in open opposition to what’s happening in the Trump administration and D.C. If you’re looking for a particular protest, below, simply press “Ctrl+F” and type the town or city you want to see into the search box. Please note that the photos are in random order; there is no intended message or specific logic in the order towns and cities below appear in. Some of the larger protests do have more photographs of them, but this is simply because more high-quality photos are readily available.}

Over 250 No Kings Day Protests Photographs

So without further ado, here’s a full tour of No Kings Day, from America to Europe and beyond:

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Introduction

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Introduction

“We need to get better at treating [mass deportations] like a business—like Amazon Prime but with human beings.”

— Todd Lyons, Donald Trump’s Acting ICE Director (April 9, 2025)

When one lives in a failing democracy, which the United States now appears to be, an abiding fear is that domestic matters will take such a turn for the worse that innocent civilians start getting plucked off the street by their government and “disappeared.”

According to an emergency ruling by one of the most powerful federal courts in the United States—the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—that’s exactly what the second Trump Administration has begun doing.

The court, in unanimously (3-0) upholding a lower-court order demanding that Trump and his agents return wrongly deported American resident Abrego Garcia to the United States by midnight on Monday, likened what the administration had done to Mr. Garcia to “an official kidnapping,” according to a report in the New York Times.

It also termed the administration’s actions “unconscionable,” echoing a lower court’s finding that the action ICE had taken with respect to Garcia was “wholly lawless.”

In response, the Trump administration, as is its wont, doubled down in every respect, including elements of its justification for kidnapping Garcia that are so troubling they couldn’t be addressed by the federal judiciary in advance of its now-passed midnight deadline. These elements are discussed, and in exhaustive detail, in this Proof report.

Most notably, one of the two Trump agents and advisers primarily responsible for the now-confirmed-illegal Trumpist deportation scheme (Stephen Miller; the other is Trump “immigration czar” Tom Homan) confirmed on social media that the official position of the Trump Administration is that any person it deports to El Salvador, including a person it now admits it arrested for no reason and deported without justification even under existing handshake agreements with El Salvador, is now in the physical and legal custody of the far-right dictator of that nation—Trump and Elon Musk friend Nayib Bukele—and cannot be returned under any circumstances.

This statement—that only the President of El Salvador can issue dispensations as to an American resident the Trump administration has deported into his custody under cover of darkness and without due process—comprises a constitutional crisis, as it’s a claim by the Trump administration that it will refuse to honor a federal judicial ruling regarding to the return of such a person to the U.S. on the grounds that honoring that ruling would be logistically impossible as a matter of international relations.

This lie serves as the starting point for this massive new Proof report on the Trump-El Salvador Scandal.

The Venezuelan Hoax

It turns out that the Trump administration kidnapping innocents off American streets and trafficking them to a fascist dictator for cash is just the tip of the iceberg.

Before there was Abrego Garcia and the Trump-El Salvador Scandal, there was what we can now charitably call the Venezuelan Hoax—which, it turns out, is necessary to understand if one wants to understand either the plight of Mr. Garcia or the rapidly expanding contours of the former scandal.

Readers must keep in mind, as we discuss the Venezuelan Hoax, that the two issues—one domestic and one foreign policy-related—that enabled Donald Trump to narrowly (by 1.4% in the popular vote) regain access to the White House were: (1) the blowback against what MAGAs mislabel as “gender ideology extremism” (in fact, merely the uncontroversial premise that trans persons have a right to exist); and (2) immigration by undocumented persons, which began spiking in the final half-year of the first Trump administration but which Trump was able to convince U.S. voters was strictly caused by former president Joe Biden.

In both cases—and as is usual for him and his party—Trump relied on isolated, non-repeating, exaggerated anecdotes to incite anxiety and fear among the American voting population with respect to both trans persons and illegal immigration.

For instance, Mr. Trump implied that there was a growing epidemic of trans women competing in women’s sports in the NCAA. As it turned out, there are “less than ten” trans women out of “more than 520,000” NCAA college athletes.

Just so, Trump spent the entirety of his 2024 U.S. presidential campaign regaling fans, rally-goers, and even interviewers with a bizarre fake chart that showed him leaving office in his first term in January 2020 rather than January 2021—before the COVID-19 pandemic hit—as a means of convincing unsuspecting U.S. voters that a massive illegal immigration spike did not begin during his presidency (as it in fact did).

Blinded by hatred of immigrants and trans persons, and susceptible to sensational one-off anecdotes, American voters fell for Trump’s con. This much is unsurprising, given Trump’s career of fraud, deceit, and (once he entered national politics) pulling prejudice-fueled fast ones on America. But if readers further understand that the main vehicle for Donald Trump prospectively seizing authoritarian power in the United States—as he’s long planned to do—will be the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 on the fraudulent grounds of a supposed “invasion” by “foreign terrorists” (this being Trump’s facially preposterous gloss on what’s actually market-propelled cross-border migration), it becomes clear how vital it’s been and will continue to be for the Trump administration to scam voters into believing America has a serious problem with acts of violence committed by immigrants.

It does not.

Immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than citizens.

If all of the United States were made up of immigrants rather than citizens, our crime rate would plummet by “60%,” according to a Northwestern University study. While of course it’s always possible to find shocking anecdotes on any topic—from violence committed by an individual immigrant to Donald Trump filling an adult diaper with his feces in the middle of a taping his NBC reality show The Apprentice—anecdotes are not Big Data, cannot spot long-term trends, and are often deceptively reductive.

Of course, even Trump’s anecdotes from the 2024 campaign trail turned out to be lies.

For instance, Trump told voters that an apartment complex in Colorado had been invaded and completely taken over by an armed Venezuelan gang. The claim, which he repeated ad nauseam throughout the election season, was untrue. In turns out that in the city of Aurora (pop. 395,052) there are only ten persons who are even members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (and that fact alone has nothing to do with whether these men are violent, invaded an apartment complex, or threaten neighbors).

Yet the Aurora Hoax turned out to be a successful dry run for Trump, reassuring him that—evidence-free—he could convince Americans that an “invasion” of the United States was being coordinated by the leftist government of Venezuela, with Tren de Aragua members are spreading out across the United States to rape and murder white people.

Obviously this claim is nothing more than a racist fantasy, but it’s consistent with the ideological garbage Trump has successfully sold his whole political career—so it was gobbled up as avidly in 2024 as it had been in 2016 and (only slightly less successfully) in 2020.

The italicized words in two paragraphs above are particularly important, however.

The reason Trump chose the nation of Venezuela for his pre-election hoax—a hoax he would explore not just during the campaign but aim to expand, post-election, as part of an apparent run-up to seizing authoritarian control over the United States (see infra)—is because Trump detests its leftist leadership. Readers must remember here that The Waldron Plot, under which Trump quite nearly declared martial law in December 2020, during his first term (before deciding to instead simply incite an armed rebellion at the United States Capitol in January 2021) was dependent on a wildly false claim of Venezuela infiltrating U.S. voting machines. That claim has now been fully recanted.

For this reason—and for the additional reason that the Venezuelan Hoax could now lead to a reinstitution of the international slave trade in the United States—breaking down exactly the terms of this particular hoax is essential. This breakdown also carries the benefit of explaining why what happened to Abrego Garcia happened, and how we ended up in a Trump-El Salvador Scandal that seems to be expanding by the day.

The 238 Venezuelan migrants Donald Trump trafficked to the far-right government in El Salvador were said to be the “worst of the worst” undocumented persons—and specifically Venezuelans—the Trump administration would be deporting as part of its historically encompassing mass deportation scheme (a scheme whose projected total cost to the United States will be trillions of dollars over fifteen years, and bring with it the likely collapse of America’s domestic labor force, which is 5% undocumented migrants overall but as high as 14% in certain industries long crucial to our economy).

To hear Trump and his top advisers tell it, these individuals were and are of such vile character that they quite reasonably could be used by U.S. voters as a proxy for all who would come after them. In short, if these 238 Venezuelan migrants weren’t the killers and rapists and terrorists that Trump, Musk, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt have long insisted they are, it would give the lie to every current and future atrocity—both domestic and overseas—that Trump is planning to build on the back of that lie (see infra). One could argue that the supposed value proposition of there even being a second Trump administration would vanish.

So here's the truth about those 238 Venezuelans.

According to a major investigative report by CBS News that looked at both the U.S. criminal-record system and the Venezuelan criminal-record system, of the 238 men Trump kidnapped off the streets of America and without due process trafficked to another country,

• 75% had no identifiable criminal record in either the United States or Venezuela;

• 17% had a non-violent criminal record that involved only minor property offenses;

• 3% had no locatable record of any kind (meaning ICE likely lacked one too); and

• only 5% had the violent criminal record Trump falsely claimed 100% of them did.

{Note: It’s worth observing that this last 5% included only a dozen men—and only some of the crimes located for these dozen men were life felonies like homicide or felonious sexual assault. That is, CBS News also found offenses that would be mere misdemeanors in the United States, like Assault—an offense that doesn’t always result in a jail sentence—or Kidnapping, which does always result in a prison term, but more likely a five- or ten-year sentence rather than the far longer ones the men convicted of Seditious Conspiracy for January 6 received, which far greater crimes and far longer sentences Trump casually commuted without doubt or concern.}

When confronted with this irrefutable hard data, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman was, apparently, shocked into incoherence. She told CBS News, which had made very clear to her that it looked at foreign criminal records also, that many of those without criminal records “are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the United States.”

In other words, the Trump administration had no meaningful response available when confronted with the truth.

So what did journalists do? They went up the chain of command and confronted AG Pam Bondi with the CBS News findings. Incredibly, her reply was even less coherent.

When at a presser Bondi was confronted with the 75% no-criminal-record finding—as to a group of 238 now-caged men previously presented to America as all having lengthy criminal records—Bondi appeared so flustered at being called out in this way that she immediately told not just one but three demonstrable lies: (1) that the 238 Venezuelan migrants “are not Venezuelan migrants,” a ludicrous proposition she defended by calling them “illegal aliens” instead (an overlapping, coextensive status that is, in this context, mere semantics); (2) that they “are committing the most violent crimes” (a falsehood contradicted by the hard data with which she had just been confronted, as in fact far from committing “the most violent crimes,” 75% of these 238 men had no records indicating they’d ever committed crimes of any kind); and (3) that “we don’t have to charge them with every crime, we can deport them and get them out of our country”—an attempt to imply that the migrants she and Trump trafficked overseas had already been found to have committed violent crimes the administration never reported.

Besides this last claim being both bizarre and false, was in any case contradicted immediately by Bondi herself with her next words, which included the claim that any Venezuelan migrant found to have committed a murder wouldn’t be deported but kept in the U.S. and charged: “If you committed a murder in our country, we’re going to keep you here and we’re going to seek the death penalty, we’re going to keep you in prison.” In other words, such persons would’ve had arrest records. Which they didn’t.

In short, every statement on this matter from the Trump administration appears to confirm that no part of its mass deportation scheme—which economists say will be as ruinous to the U.S. economy as Trump’s equally ill-conceived tariff war—has been thought out at all, and that to the extent any part of it vaguely was, it was only to (a) ensure the hoax involving Venezuelans would be as politically efficacious as the one from 2024 (the Aurora Hoax) that helped Trump regain the White House, and (b) find a way to justify it without any thought for due process or, frankly, any anticipation of future involvement by the federal judiciary (as AG Bondi’s repeated references to the idea that “we” can do whenever “we” like appear to refer to the executive branch only, not the federal government writ large).

Attempts by journalists to follow up with Bondi on her answers caused her to flee the presser posthaste.

So how does all this relate to Abrego Garcia? Well, the Venezuelan Hoax was so hurriedly and sloppily put together that it produced a series of cascading errors in ICE operations in February and March of 2025.

The Garcia incident wouldn’t have occurred had it not been seen as essential within the second Trump administration that the Venezuela Hoax become well-established in the minds of voters prior to the April 20 date Trump has set for declaring martial law on the basis of a Venezuelan “invasion” (again, keeping in mind how reminiscent this is of the December 2020 date Trump imagined for declaring martial law on the basis of alleged—but actually wholly illusory—Venezuelan election interference).

More broadly, the Venezuelan Hoax and the Garcia Scandal are related in that the legal theory devised by the Trump administration for both cases is exactly the same.

Which is exactly the legal conundrum the Trump administration is facing right now.

What the Administration will never be able to explain to any federal court is why it believes federal courts did have jurisdiction over Abrego Garcia when he was on U.S. soil, but lost that jurisdiction the moment he was put on a plane to El Salvador—with America, under the Administration’s theory of the case, losing its jurisdiction to El Salvador even as Garcia’s plane was still over U.S. airspace, and the U.S. continuing to not have jurisdiction over a U.S. resident it had had jurisdiction over for years and years as Garcia’s plane was still over international waters, and with that lack of U.S. jurisdiction continuing on as the plane was over Guatemala, and with that lack of U.S. jurisdiction then continuing on as the plane was in El Salvadoran airspace but not on El Salvadoran soil (keeping in mind that, per Trump and his team, America doesn’t have jurisdiction over its airspace). And needless to say, under the Administration’s theory of the Garcia case El Salvador’s almost mystical—and seemingly ubiquitous— jurisdiction over Garcia was also extant when Garcia arrived in a place he had no business whatsoever being: on El Salvadoran soil, the one place government officials were expressly forbidden to send him by U.S. courts across many years (see infra for why).

Should any federal court now adopt this Trumpist vision of a mystical and seemingly ubiquitous form of jurisdiction uniquely held by the nation of El Salvador—that is, jurisdiction that is triggered the second anyone is even put on a plane to El Salvador—where does that line of legal “reasoning” end, exactly?

Wouldn’t the same thing be true for any other person over whom the federal courts have jurisdiction, and who the federal courts have also long said can’t be sent to El Salvador to be incarcerated, like, say… the now-incarcerated U.S. citizens President Trump just publicly said he wants to put on planes to El Salvador as soon as possible?

Who couldn’t Trump agents kidnap off an American street and traffick to El Salvador in the dead of night, if they can do so to a Maryland resident and father of three like Abrego Garcia—whose U.S. residency status specifically precludes any transport to El Salvador, by written court order?

In other words, legally speaking, either all persons over whom our federal courts have jurisdiction are entitled to due process before they’re forcibly removed from America, or they don’t. While certain classes of persons may receive more limited due process than others, there’s no category of person in the United States who can receive none—and Abrego Garcia, who’s certainly not in the least-protected category of American resident, clearly received none.

So the now-formalized position of the Trump administration is that as long as it can get a person off American soil (literally off U.S. soil, i.e., even if it means only into U.S. airspace) before their case is reviewed by a federal court, that court can do nothing at all and that person is, and permanently, under the jurisdiction of the government that controls whatever country that plane flies to. If this position were to be adopted with respect to Abrego Garcia, it would likewise be true for, by way of example, any U.S. citizen who’s the minor child of undocumented persons; a legal permanent resident of the United States; someone who’s been granted asylum in the United States; and yes, even for U.S. citizens, too. The rule Trump proposes, if enacted, would have to apply to every person on U.S. soil, because it’s been framed as a way for the executive branch to evade the requirements of due process that every person on U.S. soil is entitled to.

If you doubt that this really is the position of the Trump administration, take a look at the words of the chief law enforcement officer of that administration, Pam Bondi:

Bondi makes clear that anyone deported by the Trump administration who ends up on El Salvadoran soil “will remain in El Salvador,” with the jurisdiction of the judiciary being “over” at that point. While she’s ostensibly discussing persons removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (the AEA), and is ostensibly speaking of the recent Supreme Court decision indicating that the 238 Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador without due process aren’t going to have their cases reviewed, Bondi’s legal reasoning has nothing to do with the AEA or those 238 souls. Per the interview above, her reading of the Supreme Court’s “loud and clear” ruling is that a federal district court judge has “no jurisdiction” over recent deportees because “that flight [is] in El Salvador” and “those inmates are in El Salvador.”

It is, in other words—at least according to Trump’s DOJ—the fact that a flight makes it to El Salvador that leaves federal courts without any jurisdiction, not what SCOTUS actually said: that going forward Trump deportees will be subject to federal jurisdiction before deportation.

If all this seems a little confusing, it admittedly is.

Five far-right Justices on the Supreme Court decided yesterday, without giving any reason for doing so, that they would not attempt to adjudicate the fate of the 238 Venezuelan detainees now in El Salvador—a group out of which, at most, only 12 could possibly belong there— but instead of doing nothing with this bizarre omission by the Supreme Court (see infra for the text itself), what the second Trump administration’s chief law enforcement officer did was frame this omission, a jurisprudential silence, as an indication that what saved the Trump administration from having the fate of those 238 people reviewed by the Supreme Court was the fact that they were successfully shipped to El Salvador.

By this logic, all the Trump administration must do now is ensure that it gets anyone it really wants to stay in El Salvador onto El Salvadoran soil before the Supreme Court gets wind of it.

If you’re thinking that the Supreme Court could have avoided this by making clear what it plans to do about those 238 mostly innocent souls now rotting in a supermax prison in El Salvador, you’re right. But five far-right Justices chose not to, and the result of that inaction is that, as of today, the Trump administration still believes in the aforementioned, almost mystical notion about El Salvadoran jurisdiction that it feels is triggered the second anyone is put on a plane to El Salvador and the plane takes off. (This needless confusion has now also caused two federal judges—one in Texas and one in New York—to rule, earlier today, in a way that seems to conflict with SCOTUS’ recent ruling.)

Someday, maybe very soon, the Trump administration will test this new license by seeing how close to deporting a U.S. citizen with no criminal record it can get under the “rule” as it now (per Pam Bondi) perceives it to be: just get your deportees aloft.

It’s almost hard to blame Bondi here, as opposed to the five Justices who well knew, on the public record and the record before them, that the Trump administration had sent innocents to die in El Salvador and still chose to do nothing about it. In the very moment the Court breached a longstanding legal precept—that everyone on U.S. soil gets due process before deportation, and that this fact doesn’t change just because the illegal deportation has already been accomplished—that precept could be seen to have been permanently and irretrievably pierced. This certainly seems to be the lesson that Pam Bondi took from the recent ruling.

As The Atlantic just wrote, “If federal courts cannot order the return of someone exiled to a foreign gulag by mistake, then the administration is free to exile citizens and then claim they did so in error, while leaving them to rot” (emphasis supplied).

Indeed—this is exactly the danger of Bondi’s “air-and-soil” reading of how to illegally exile someone from America and leave them to die in a Central American death trap.

The only question now is whether those government officials, like Bondi, willing to pierce the one-time core constitutional principle that no deportation can occur without due process will, in the future, act with malicious intent (as The Atlantic and this author fear). And of course anyone who watched the first Trump administration between 2017 and 2021 and is now watching this second one knows the answer is yes.

During his first term, Donald Trump infamously spoke of wanting to see his political enemies executed. During his second term, his co-president Elon Musk has just as infamously spoken of viewing those who oppose his political ambitions as terrorists. And Attorney General Pam Bondi—never one to seize integrity from the jaws of dishonor—has concurred with Mr. Musk on this. So these are exactly the fascists the Supreme Court should have been looking for when trying to determine what sort of government agents all deportees would in the future need to be defended against.

But the Court failed in its duty—per usual in dealing with Mr. Trump and his agents—and now hundreds of people with no business being in El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s “CECOT” supermax prison will be there for the rest of their natural lives.

Which is why we now need to speak, in excruciating detail, about what CECOT is.

Inside CECOT—Where 238 Venezuelan Migrants and Abrego Garcia Are Being Held on No Grounds At All

We know that the intent of the Trump administration is to send every future Trump deportee to CECOT—not just the vanishingly small subset AG Pam Bondi likes to speak of while knowingly pretending its criminal count is 2000% larger than it really is—because another Trump official seemingly chosen for loyalty and telegenics rather than competence, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has told America so. And she did it through one of the most despicable political ads that any U.S. political operation has ever aired:

Using prisoners as political props is grotesque enough, but to add insult to injury, Ms. Noem begins her ad by first pretending that the Trump administration has only sent to CECOT “terrorists” known to have enacted “violence” in American communities.

To be clear, not only is this a lie, but there’s no evidence that any of the Venezuelan migrants Noem sent to CECOT—or, for that matter, anyone else Noem has sent to CECOT—fit this description. Perhaps appreciating that she’s just told a lie, with her second sentence Noem changes her initial stance entirely and says instead that anyone who merely “comes to [the United States illegally….could face [CECOT]” as “one of the consequences.” While horrifying, and moreover unconstitutional, at least this latter confession—that the Trump administration doesn’t actually distinguish between undocumented persons when sending people to die in CECOT—has the minor benefit of being true. As CNN confirms, thus far all persons who have been deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador have been sent to CECOT and nowhere else.

(As the first report in this Proof series noted, El Salvador literally has no asylum system, so CECOT is the only potential endpoint for any U.S. deportee—including those with no history of gang membership and no record.)

In her final sentence in the ad, Secretary Noem reiterates this truism: “Know that this facility is one of the tools in [the Trump administration’s] toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” While ordinarily a statement like this would mean only what it means on its face—anyone who enters America illegally and commits crimes could end up in CECOT—the fact that the Trump administration already makes no such distinctions and the fact that Noem, Bondi, Leavitt, Trump and Miller all use the fraudulent construction (“criminal illegal aliens”) to describe any undocumented person, even those who have only violated civil statutes regarding the documentation required for residence in the United States, we can be sure that one of the “crimes against the American people” Noem refers to here is—tautologically—simply entering the United States illegally. Again, this is usually only a civil infraction.

In case there was any doubt about her meaning, Secretary Noem has since posted this (note her attachment of an image of CECOT to the generalized threat she makes here):

So now that we know that any person who Trump, Noem, Bondi, Homan, and Miller deport to El Salvador is going to CECOT, what sort of hellhole are they being sent to?

Here are the basics about CECOT, via CNN:

1. All sentences are life sentences, meaning that if you enter CECOT the only way you are leaving is in a body bag.

2. 100 men to a cell.

3. The men are kept in their cell for 47 out of every 48 hours, which is more extreme than the most extreme temporary solitary confinement procedures America uses.

4. While in their cells the men have “less than two feet” of living space, which has been described as less room than America gives to “livestock” (Financial Times).

5. The cells have no mattresses, pillows, or furniture of any kind.

6. The lights are never turned off.

7. There is no recreation time—ever.

8. The prisoners are never allowed outside.

9. There are no educational programs—or indeed programs of any kind.

10. Visitors are not allowed.

11. Media coverage is not allowed unless pre-approved by the nation’s dictator.

12. Prisoners are allowed no possessions of any kind.

13. Prisoners use an “open toilet” in full view of their 99 cellmates.

14. A cement basin is used for communal washing.

15. A common jug is used for drinking water, ensuring that if any inmate gets ill, all of the rest of them will, too.

16. The prison’s defenses include 1,000 armed guards, 19 watchtowers, multiple levels of electric fences, and eight discrete warehouse-like “sections” that the prisoners will never leave until, as noted above, they depart inside a body bag.

Proof will put aside, for the moment, that under the United States Constitution the foregoing would be deemed illegal in toto—a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment”—for even the worst criminals in American history: mass murderers, serial killers, serial child molesters, domestic terrorists, persons convicted of Seditious Conspiracy, or persons who have been credibly accused of over 25 acts of Rape and/or Sexual Assault, like Bill Cosby and Donald Trump.

What is perhaps more horrifying than any or all of the items in the list above is that they are applied to everyone in CECOT, which includes not just gang members with convictions for Murder but also:

1. Anyone awaiting trial in El Salvador, against whom absolutely nothing has yet been proven (and may never be);

2. innocent bystanders accidentally caught up in raids, uninvolved in even any allegations of misconduct (with El Salvador admitting to CNN that “several thousand” such persons have already ended up in CECOT in its 25 months of operation);

3. persons charged with nonviolent offenses that would be entirely noncriminal in the United States, such as having hair that’s too long, a tattoo a police officer deems objectionable, or involvement in what is mysteriously called “illegal gathering” (one New Yorker report detailed a man getting arrested for this while simply eating at a public restaurant with two friends);

4. permanent residents of other nations deported entirely by accident from their home countries, despite having no criminal record and being non-removable by law (e.g., Abrego Garcia);

5. individuals deported from the United States purely for being undocumented but without any criminal records at all;

6. individuals deported from the United States who were undocumented and had only nonviolent records; and

7. individuals deported from the United States under allegation of belonging to a gang, even in circumstances where no proof of gang membership was ever provided and the individual has since been confirmed not to be in a gang (e.g., Andry Romero).

It remains to be seen if Trump and his team will also attempt to send to CECOT foreign students whose visas get revoked—presumably, at a minimum those students who have their visas revoked but don’t immediately vacate the United States will be eligible for CECOT—and whether this treatment will also be afforded to asylum-seekers whose asylum the United States has now cancelled (again, with the caveat that Trump’s agents have made clear that anyone knowingly in the U.S. illegally could be sent to CECOT, so presumably an asylum-seeker who doesn’t immediately vacate the United States, possibly due to having nowhere else to go and/or no money to get there, could well end up in CECOT). And of course Trump has now made clear, repeatedly, that he wants U.S.-citizen prison inmates now in the United States to be sent to CECOT in order to save him money on their storage—with the sort of crimes Trump has referenced as being eligible for a transfer including everything from homicide to Simple Assault (a mere misdemeanor that is often punished with no jail time at all).

Yet as this author has found over the last few days while discussing CECOT with others online, the universal understanding of Trump voters and MAGAs writ large appears to be that every single person in CECOT is either a proven terrorist or a proven mass murderer. The Trump administration has worked extremely hard to spread this lie, with the predictable result being that MAGAs daily celebrate the fact that CECOT treats all its inmates worse than animals—on the grounds that, in their view, all of them are animals. Nor are these Trump supporters likely to ever accept any alternative narrative, as the whole premise of CECOT existing in the first place dissipates into nothingness if you accept that a huge percentage of the CECOT prisoners shown in popular images and video of that hellhole have absolutely no business being there.

Simply put, CECOT exists for only one reason: to enable a brutal far-right dictator both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are friends with to simultaneously (i) arrest and throw into a hole anyone who opposes him, (ii) appear tough on crime when in fact he’s known to be secretly negotiating with the very gangs he claims to be policing, and (iii) release high-production-value videos about what a badass he supposedly is.

CECOT has nothing to do with legitimate law enforcement, and certainly nothing at all to do with “terrorism” or “terrorists” (the “T” in its Spanish-language acronym).

Very few of those in CECOT belong in even a maximum security prison, let alone in a supermax, and none deserve to be treated worse than animals.

Trump voters like what they see when they look at photos of CECOT for the simple reason that Trump voters are afraid of the chief demographic we find at CECOT: young brown men (even some brown juveniles) with tattoos. These apparently look like very “hard” and “dangerous” creatures to many Trump voters, even though only a small percentage of them are actually so.

What Bukele has done is the one thing everyone in law enforcement in America knows not to do: put the most hardened criminals in the same living space as an even larger population of persons who may or may not have done anything wrong but certainly can and should eventually be returned to their home communities as potentially productive citizens. The reason Bukele can house pretrial defendants and political prisoners and total innocents and foreign asylum-seekers and nonviolent offenders alongside hardened killers is because he has no interest in any of them ever coming out alive.

In short, in American terms Nayib Bukele is a monster. CECOT is a Crime Against Humanity. And anyone who willy-nilly sends non-violent offenders to CECOT has likewise committed a Crime Against Humanity—and should be treated accordingly under U.S. and international law.

Perhaps one day they will be.

But this report is not about such people. This report is about people far worse than the people I’ve just described, because they’re selling humans to CECOT for two equally depraved reasons: (1) money, and (2) political power. Such persons can reasonably be accounted among the most dangerous, deranged, and devilish persons alive on Earth.

This is where Proof picks up the story of Abrego Garcia, who’s now in the hands of such creatures.

The Cover-Up Is Just As Bad As the Crime

Both the Trump administration and the Bukele administration have falsely—and we must also say grotesquely—justified what was done to Abrego Garcia by calling Garcia a member of an extremely dangerous Central American gang, MS-13.

This allegation is grotesque not merely because these same slanderers simultaneously admit, out of the other side of their mouths, that Garcia was deported from the United States by accident, but also because the legal status of Garcia inside America is that of…

…a victim of crimes perpetrated by MS-13.

That’s right: the above-alluded-to reason why Abrego Garcia was repeatedly found by federal courts to be non-removable to El Salvador wasn’t just because he’s attended all his U.S. immigration hearings as prescribed, or just because he’s a father of three who has lived in Maryland for years, but because the federal judiciary has explicitly found him to be in danger of being harmed (in the future as he was in the past) by MS-13.

So where did the Trump administration put him? In a foreign supermax prison with MS-13 members.

And how did the Trump administration excuse itself for putting this man in a position to be murdered? By falsely accusing this victim of MS-13 of being a member of MS-13.

And what did the Trump administration do when one of its agents candidly told a court the truth about all this? It put him on indefinite administrative leave. Indeed, it was so angry about the truth being told to a federal judge that it put the man’s boss on indefinite administrative leave also.

So as is customary for most statements Donald Trump and his agents, or Nayib Bukele and his agents, swear to be true, in fact it’s the opposite of their statements that’s true.

Abrego Garcia was in such danger of being killed by the extremely dangerous Central American gang Donald Trump claims to want to protect people from that he fled El Salvador, was given asylum inside the United States, and was repeatedly told by our federal judiciary that he would never be returned to El Salvador because of a very real possibility he’d be killed there. And that order would have been followed, except for the fact that Trump and Bukele had a Venezuelan Hoax they wanted to perpetrate on U.S. voters and El Salvadoran citizens alike—so in their rush to produce a Hollywood-style CECOT documentary showcasing innocent people (falsely framed as hardened criminals) being condemned to die in a hellhole, they trampled on Abrego Garcia and his family and the lives of hundreds of others (and their thousands of family members) and in the bargain will likely cause a number of innocent people to lose their lives.

And they feel great about it. They’re even going to hold a celebration for themselves in D.C. on April 14. Karoline Leavitt has said the purpose of this self-congratulatory meet-up will be to declare the Trump-Bukele partnership a “model” for the world.

Yes, really.

But Abrego Garcia’s story doesn’t end there. He may be a father who never missed a court date or scheduled immigration hearing in the entirety of his time in the United States who has now been placed in the perfect position to be murdered—with Team Trump doing all it possibly can to ensure he stays in that position—and he may also be a man with three kids and a clean record, but we know much more than this about the man and his situation.

And what we know makes his predicament even more of a nightmare and a travesty.

The reason attempts by the Trump administration to retroactively justify kidnapping Garcia by claiming that an anonymous source told ICE agents that Garcia is in MS-13 were immediately batted aside by United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland Paula Xinis is that Garcia has never lived in the state where a supposed eyewitness claims he’s an active member of MS-13. But even more than this, Judge Xinis found that the actual reason ICE picked up Abrego Garcia was merely that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey and had a tattoo that ICE agents didn’t quite like the look of (on the now-infamous ICE “points” sheet, a choice of shirt gang members appreciate and a suspect tattoo are enough for arrest).

That’s it. That was enough to put Garcia on a plane to CECOT and his own death.

As for the only person in this situation besides Garcia who did everything right, Erez Reuveni—the DOJ attorney who told Judge Xinis the truth about Garcia’s deportation—not only did this lawyer in good standing with his state and federal bars, who did exactly what the ABA’s Rules of Professional Conduct required of him, lose his job for precisely that reason (which tells us all we need to know about the sort of attorneys Donald Trump wants in his employ), but there appears to be no general outcry over that particular turn of events. This, despite the fact that, in previous eras of American political history, such an obvious attempt to cover up a Kidnapping and then punish a lawyer who, like a whistleblower, was doing his job honorably in reporting it would be a national scandal; some elements of the Watergate Scandal match this fact-pattern.

Unfortunately, in this era Reuveni is merely a footnote to a quickly widening scandal that major media is still significantly undercovering.

Even recent social media posts by the architect of Trump’s illegal deportation scheme, Stephen Miller, which appear to be intended to direct mass anger at Judge Xinis—opining, baselessly, that she’s a “Marxist” who intends to become more powerful than the “President of El Salvador”—have flown under media’s radar screen, though they at once constitute Defamation, seem bent on placing Judge Xinis’ life in danger, and serve as a confession that the Trump administration wants a foreign dictator to steal legal authority from American judges. This is surely one of the stranger reversals in recent American political history—and additional evidence of the persistent lack of loyalty to America and its institutions that seems to run throughout Trump’s camp.

The Supreme Court Spreads Its Corruption, Endangering the Life of Abrego Garcia

So now the clock is ticking on the life of Abrego Garcia.

Yet what no one on social media or in any court has yet heard from any member of the Trump administration is any concern for the life of Abrego Garcia, though all concede, now—albeit some only implicitly—that that life now under threat.

Indeed, because the very basis for Garcia ever being in the United States at all was a series of judicial findings to the effect that he would be killed if a government official did what Miller, Homan, Trump, and their agents in ICE have done by kidnapping him and sending him to El Salvador without due process, everyone must agree, as a matter of court record, that his life is now in imminent danger.

And in fact, it’s in even greater danger than any of those courts could have imagined.

Why? Because what American courts found over and over and over and over and over again with respect to Garcia is that his life would be in danger if he merely stepped on El Salvadoran soil at all. Yet what has happened here is exponentially worse: a man who is a target of MS-13 was sent to the one place worldwide where as many known killers from MS-13 as possible are being warehoused in storage facilities without individual cells. Had Stephen Miller and his agents simply driven Garcia up to the border of El Salvador and dumped him there, he’d be significantly safer than he is now. What they did, instead, was put him in chains and fly him directly to a locked room with 99 other men—some of whom may be MS-13 members.

There’s no good reason, in other words, to believe Garcia will leave El Salvador alive.

Certainly, if he’s to survive being caged in CECOT, every second counts. Each needless second he spends in CECOT is a second in which he could be murdered by precisely the sort of men the entirety of our federal government long promised to protect him from.

So in light of all this, what’s the Supreme Court doing? Dragging its heels.

And what’s the Trump administration doing? Dragging its heels.

We already know that the Court has no interest in saving the lives of anyone already in El Salvador. It made that clear (see infra) with how it handled the cases of the 238 Venezuelan migrants already consigned to CECOT and death—as well as 40 others who have since joined them, with an equal lack of due process or evidence of wrong-doing. The Court said there’d be judicial review for future such cases, but not old ones.

It certainly seems like the Trump administration is aware that Abrego Garcia’s life is in danger. In fact, it may even be dragging its feet for this very reason. After all, if Mr. Garcia dies, his case ends. And lest this seem to assign too much cruelty to Trump’s agents, recall that they summarily ended the government career of the one person in their cohort—the aforementioned Reuveni—who took any action to save Garcia’s life.

As already reported by Proof, El Salvador sees hundreds of prison murders a year. So given that Nayib Bukele knows that this case is ongoing—he’s tweeted about it on his Twitter account—why doesn’t he transfer Garcia elsewhere? CNN reports that in CECOT “U.S. deportees live in identical cells to convicted gangsters,” and quotes the warden of CECOT saying “there are no [special] privileges” for any inmate, so given that Bukele has already made “several thousand” mistakes in the first 25 months of his pride-and-joy supermax—meaning thousands of innocent El Salvadorans already suffered through being warehoused with some of this hemisphere’s worst killers—why hasn’t Bukele adjusted his policies to ensure that men like Garcia he knows don’t belong in CECOT aren’t put there in the first instance (or if they are, why doesn’t he then move them)? Again, it’s hard to attribute any reasoning to this besides Bukele knowing that one way for Garcia’s thorny situation to be “resolved” is for a CECOT inmate to kill him.

Certainly, the tone of tweets and interviews by top Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller with respect to Abrego Garcia has been nothing short of gleeful. This suggests the administration candidly doesn’t care if Garcia lives or dies, and is far more invested in convincing Americans that Garcia is a member of MS-13—which he manifestly is not—than in saving his life. Americans should presume that if or when the Trump administration starts sending American citizens to CECOT, it will exhibit exactly the same degree of carelessness on the question of whether these U.S. citizens get tortured or die as both it and its partner Nayib Bukele are exhibiting right now.

Okay, but what’s the Supreme Court’s excuse for dragging its feet?

Knowing all of the foregoing, both a federal district court and a three-judge federal appeals court panel moved quickly and unanimously declare that Garcia needed to be brought back to the United States by midnight on Monday (April 7, 2025). All four of these federal judges had heard uncontested evidence that Garcia was kidnapped for no reason, and they reacted accordingly. All four of those federal judges had heard uncontested evidence that Garcia was (and is) at risk of being murdered every minute he stays in El Salvador, and they reacted accordingly. All four of those federal judges had heard uncontested evidence that the Trump administration has now begrudgingly admitted making a mistake in its handling of Garcia—even if the admission came with significant professional consequences for its author—and they reacted accordingly. All four of these federal judges heard uncontested evidence that Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, complied for years with every immigration regulation in the United States, and was repeatedly found by federal courts to be non-removable to El Salvador. Upon hearing all this evidence these judges reacted appropriately, So why did Garcia’s case hit a wall the moment it reached the most politicized court in America, SCOTUS?

The question seems to answer itself, doesn’t it?

Indeed, the one remaining issue in the Abrego Garcia case is a purely political one. It is one that has little exclusively to do with the man’s life or freedom, so encompassing are its long-term ramifications: whether the second Trump administration is correct in arguing that the second it puts any person on a plane headed out of the United States—even if it puts that person on that plane under cover of darkness specifically to evade judicial scrutiny—no federal court can meaningfully review or in any way undo that asportation because the person so mishandled has already come under the legal custody of whichever foreign government that plane is headed toward. As The Atlantic recently put it, “The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there.”

The problem is that this is at once a weighty question politically but also a very easy one legally—which fact casts a pall over Chief Justice John Roberts’ determination (which he signified, per Supreme Court precedent, by accepting the case for a full review by the Court) that at least four of his colleagues would deem the case worthy of extended consideration. Yet is political exile for Trump’s enemies actually on the table under the U.S. Constitution? Nervous Supreme Court-watchers see in this case the same potential for a shocking result as 2024’s Trump v. United States, when the issue on the table (whether a President of the United States is above the law) likewise seemed an easy one… but the answer returned by Roberts and his far-right colleagues was yes.

As Justice Roberts sat down to review the emergency petition seeking to overrule both Judge Xinis and the Fourth Circuit—Roberts is in charge of being the first reader of federal petitions coming out of the D.C. area, including Maryland—he knew that the Trump administration doesn’t contest having a handshake agreement with a foreign dictator that it somewhat inexplicably deems binding (“inexplicably” because as a politician Donald Trump is infamous for reneging on most deals, demanding instant renegotiations, and working back-channels to create special carve-outs). Roberts also knew that the nature of that agreement was and is a financial arrangement by which the United States transfers human bodies to a foreign power in exchange for both financial and in-kind benefits; both Trump and co-president Musk have spoken at length of this financial benefit, which means that in effect both men have admitted to being engaged in an international slave trade: selling human bodies for profit.

Not only is this overtly unconstitutional (not to mention a simple fact-pattern that even a first-year law student could easily resolve correctly) but even its seemingly inevitable future devolution—a situation that would see Trump, Musk, and the GOP trading U.S. citizens’ bodies to foreign governments for money and the benefit of seeing their political enemies permanently exiled, caged for the rest of their natural lives, and possibly murdered in the most dangerous prison on Earth—is even more conspicuously illegal. There’s no legal issue in doubt here, and a man’s life hangs in the balance, yet Justice Roberts evinced no sense of urgency in his (mis)handling of a matter that showed up in his inbox as an emergency petition.

A Glimmer of Hope?

Proof by no means suggests that it’s unusual for a lone Justice of the Supreme Court to rule on an emergency petition asking for a stay of execution of a lower court order. As already noted, that’s exactly how emergency petitions to the Supreme Court work.

And this Court in particular does often accept for full briefing and argument, rather than resolution by a single Justice, legal arguments from America’s political far right that have no basis in either the court record or Supreme Court precedent. While not excusable, this far-right Court’s willingness to placate Donald Trump by listening to his cockamamie pseudolegal propositions is well-documented—and since at least two current Justices (Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) are consistent in assenting to almost anything this president wants, Chief Justice Roberts is not wrong to think that that “magic number” of Justices desiring a full briefing and argument on any given Trumpism-related matter (four) is much easier to reach than it ever was previously.

On the other hand, continuing to indulge this president’s cockamamie pseudolegal propositions only encourages seeing more of them in the future. It only increases the odds that one of these propositions somehow finds the support of three or four of the most radical, precedent-ambivalent Justices in recent memory, giving Donald Trump just the rhetorical ammunition he needs to argue to the public—as he may well, one day soon—that he can blithely ignore a Supreme Court majority if “the good judges” (as he might style it) ruled in his favor. Even more notably, it creates needless delays on emergency issues, and these delays end up having real-world impact. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it was Trump v. United States that saved candidate Trump from his pending criminal cases by making it impossible to try any of them pre-election; here, a delay of that magnitude might well give a known sociopath who is also a foreign dictator all the time he needs to dispose of Garcia by other means.

Of course, we can’t yet know exactly what the Court is thinking on Abrego Garcia, as the case is now sitting with it and will stay in that status for some unknown duration.

What we can do is look at the recent Supreme Court order with respect to Trump’s Venezuelan Hoax.

{Note: If you want to skip to the analysis of the Court’s ruling, scroll past the images below.}

The glaring errors in the reasoning presented above are legion.

First and most egregiously—as this report already indicated, while illustrating how this infelicity in the ruling was exploited by Attorney General Bondi—the Court’s far-right majority lets the Trump administration off the hook for the several hundred innocent persons (at least 278 in total) it wrongly trafficked to Bukele and El Salvador, explicitly stating that it is only “after the date of this order” that the administration must start providing AEA detainees proper legal notice of what’s happening to them so that they can seek legal redress from the federal judiciary.

In other words, the majority tells the Trump administration that past offenses are now forgiven—which of course only invites future ones.

Second, by confirming to the Trump administration that the proper venue for all AEA claims lies “in the district of confinement”—in other words, wherever Trump agents kidnap their victim to, not where they’re kidnapped from—the Court implicitly aids and abets these kidnappings in the first instance. How? By (again implicitly) urging the administration to quickly get those they nab out of the jurisdiction they live in as quickly as possible, so that proper venue can vest in whichever locale the Trump administration selects. By comparison, if the Court had ruled that jurisdiction remains in the venue where the relevant constitutionally cognizable event occurred—i.e., the sudden seizure of a person by their government—it would have communicated to ICE agents that they should not remove any person from their home jurisdiction without providing them with due process first, as the case will eventually end up in that venue.

But this second error by the Supreme Court—if indeed it was only an error, rather than malevolence and spite on the subject of the rights due undocumented persons—is actually much worse than even this. Why? Because the jurisdiction(s) the majority implicitly urges ICE agents to remove their victims from are also the venues in which they have friends, family, financial resources, possibly an existing personal attorney, and familiarity with the local court system and local institutions. It’s in these “home” jurisdictions that ICE’s victims have the best chance of seeking legal redress before they’re trafficked abroad, not just because those jurisdictions are more likely to be left-leaning—though this is true; Trump is deliberately targeting purple and blue states more than states that voted for him handily in November—but also due to the fact that a person’s home jurisdiction is where most of the exculpatory evidence they can bring to bear before an immigration court resides.

In other words, by the time a detainee finds that their clock for a habeas petition is running, they not only have almost certainly been brought to whatever venue the Trump administration deems most hostile to the rights of detainees, but they’ve also been taken away, likely in the dead of night, from the place they know best. This not only traumatizes detainees at the very moment they need to be entirely cool-headed, but forcibly separates them from (a) eyewitnesses who could be brought before the court to substantiate their identity, their employment, and their lack of involvement with foreign gangs; (b) documentary evidence that would establish prior compliance with immigration orders; and (c) the financial and family resources a detainee would surely need to call upon as they’re experiencing terror, trauma, and a shockingly short turnaround time for all legal filings.

The majority in the case above has now ensured that none of this will be available to detainees—and even rewards the government for taking detainees as far from their homes and families as possible and doing nothing to alert those loved ones as to where their relative has been taken. If past is precedent, such detainees will be moved hundreds or even thousands of miles from their homes, and will go before judges who don’t see them as fellow residents of a given state, don’t sit in states Trump’s draconian arrests harm most, and do preside over courts where immigrants are habitually treated like chattel. Why would the Trump administration judge-shop their deportation cases to any other type of venue, after all?

Third, the Court explicitly doesn’t establish what constitutes “reasonable notice” in AEA cases, which means the Trump administration—whose bad faith in such matters should already be evident to the courts—will be permitted to play games almost in perpetuity with (a) how little notice is given, (b) how legally insufficient that notice is, and (c) how confusing and otherwise misleading the notice is.

Indeed, the Trump administration can manipulate almost every aspect of the context in which notice is provided, rendering that notice almost meaningless—especially to detainees who, as noted above, have been dragged far away from their homes and family and deliberately traumatized as much as possible. The Supreme Court seems almost to be urging many months or years of lethargic federal appellate litigation over matters it could have quickly put to rest with a clear order. And of course it is doing all this, unforgivably, at a time it knows lives are at stake overseas, not to mention the medium-term freedom of tens of thousands or millions of people living in the United states.

Fourth, on a matter of this significance every conceivable effort should have been made to ensure either a unanimous decision or something other than a 5-4 ruling. This sort of legal question is of such dire import to the future of America that jurists refusing to make an effort to form some sort of consensus feels utterly unacceptable.

The five Justices who brute-forced this almost flip decision even openly mock their four colleagues over the latter’s desire for this question to be resolved more carefully, more clearly, and over a slightly longer duration. Yet given that there’s no evidence that more than a handful of the individuals the Trump administration is deporting are actually dangerous—and even those who are are already in secure custody (and frankly probably removable without the AEA, putting them outside the scope of this case)—it’s unclear on what basis the Court could contend that there’ll be “irreparable harm” to the Trump administration unless it acts in its favor as quickly as possible.

The speed of the above pro-administration decision, as well as the partisan nature of it, therefore seems capricious—and heedless of the context in which the case arises (as well as some readily foreseeable downstream consequences).

Fifth, while some will hail the fact that even the conservative majority here admitted that AEA detainees deserve judicial review and must have it, the majority hastens to add that this review is “limited,” and that it’s specifically limited to the most basic of assessments—assessments that are almost tautological, as they require a federal judge to presume on the front end that the AEA rightly applies to those whom the executive branch of the federal government has already declared the AEA applies to.

To explain: President Trump’s invocation of the AEA—a statute intended to deal with foreign combatants on U.S. soil—is farcical as applied to (taking the case in the light more favorable to the Trump administration, for argument’s sake) “foreign-born gang members.” Foreign-born gang members aren’t “enemy combatants” unless they’re being directed by a foreign government, and the Trump administration has provided no evidence, to any court, that they are. (It also has a horrifying track record, as noted before, of lying about the Venezuelan government in particular for political gain; such lies led to death and destruction as recently as January of 2021.)

Just so, foreign-born gang members are not “terrorists” unless there’s evidence that they aim to engage in violent acts for political ends. The Trump administration has provided no evidence, to any court, that they are. So why is the majority’s discussion of what “limited judicial review” is to be afforded AEA detainees predicated on what is clearly an illegal invocation of the AEA? Given that, as noted above, Trump agents will be certain to send their detainees to the most conservative federal district court judges in the U.S. is, the majority’s blithe acceptance of the Trump administration’s invocation of the Act ensures that these invariably highly partisan judges will act just the same. Indeed, beyond a small number of basic documentary submissions from the government, the majority imagines very little of consequence happening at the AEA judicial reviews it’s here mandating. And given that the Supreme Court is well aware that this administration in particular has almost never had its documentation in order, and has even repeatedly passed on to federal courts erroneous documentation, and has, even worse, at times willfully withheld from federal judges information they absolutely must have to make informed decisions about a detainee, the majority deliberately creating an almost pretextual form of due process for AEA detainees really is unconscionable.

Sixth, though this position is mocked by the majority, what the four dissenters here are specifically asking for is precisely the sort of guidance an honorable judge hearing an AEA detainee case would want. This would include some sense of exactly what removal notices must include; how much time and how much access to documents and/or live testimony a detainee must be afforded prior to a removal; and what sort of evidentiary standards and framework applies at such hearings. It’s well and good for the majority to say that the government must simply show that someone is indeed “an alien enemy fourteen years of age or older”—meaning, under the particular executive order these cases are being heard under, a Venezuelan citizen who’s over fourteen and a member of Tren de Aragua—but surely the Justices are aware that the third of these questions has already come under significant judicial scrutiny on the grounds that the Trump administration evidently has no capacity to determine who is or is not a gang member.

This administration simply hasn’t developed the source of human-source network required to make and substantiate such allegations in a court of law. In fact, in the rare instances in which this government has seemed able to establish a detainee’s gang membership, it’s relied on the sort of eyewitness testimony it will be hustling detainees away from to ensure that they don’t have access to rebuttal witnesses.

Likewise, questions of citizenship, age, and immigration status may in more cases than readers would expect depend on the provision of complex paperwork the Trump administration will now deliberately be separating detainees from, at the implicit urging of the Supreme Court. Under such foreseeable circumstances, this majority blithely congratulating itself for allowing “limited judicial review” for AEA detainees is something approaching nauseating.

Nor are these problems that only the attorney who authors Proof can see—or only problems lawyers generally can see. Anyone can see them.

Certainly, the dissenting Justices had no difficult doing so. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, admirably summarized in her dissent the situation the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has created—not just for AEA detainees but, in a possibly near-term dystopian future, one that could arrive as early as this year for many U.S. citizens:

On the other end of the spectrum, conservative lawyers who want to deliberately misconstrue the Supreme Court’s ruling are warmly invited to do so. And it’s not just Pam Bondi, either. Vice President J.D. Vance is also a lawyer, and after the ruling above he instantly took to Twitter to confirm that he’s taken from the Court’s ruling exactly what the ruling’s minority feared that most would (as did Elon Musk, who’s not a lawyer but provides a flag-waving peanut gallery to the contemptible post below).

So now we have two of the men atop the Trump administration pretending that (and also working hard to convince others that) the far-right Supreme Court majority just held that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s immigration enforcement.”

Never mind that that’s not what the ruling said. It is what the ruling, seemingly on purpose, invited readers to think if they wished. And as it’s those partisan readers who will, in the first instance, be interpreting what “limited judicial review [for AEA detainees” looks like in real time, we can now be sure that they will find every way possible to make pre-deportation AEA judicial hearings all but meaningless.

Moreover, while what Vance and Musk are crowing here only applies to “immigration enforcement,” we must keep in mind that President Trump has explicitly contended that “terrorism,” “foreign policy,” and “international affairs” are in exactly the same camp as “immigration enforcement”—which means that a seventh problem with the ruling above is that the Trump administration may act, going forward, as though the law of the land is that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s immigration enforcement” and that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s counterterrorism enforcement” and that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s foreign policy initiatives.” All of which means that, going forward, all the Trump administration must do to evade meaningful judicial review—in its own view—is declare that a given initiative constitutes counterterrorism enforcement or a foreign policy initiative.

And what is Trump’s newest criminal justice proposal? To deport U.S. inmates in El Salvador. Why shouldn’t he now term that a “foreign policy” initiative? And as Pam Bondi aggressively expands the definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any act of any kind that might be seen as being motivated by a progressive ideology (an idea that in essence criminalizes progressivism itself), how soon before Trump’s criminal justice policies are reframed as “counterterrorism enforcement” that lies outside the bounds of any meaningful judicial review? Indeed, redefining offenses against persons and property as offenses against the State (i.e., “terrorism”) is a ploy most neo-fascist governments use to repress citizens and expand government power. While thus far Donald Trump has taken the position that he intends to start deporting U.S. citizens to a prison no one ever leaves alive only if it’s “legal,” vague Supreme Court decisions like the one above will produce that outcome by dint of their own vagueness, which is exactly the foreseeable harm that Justice Sotomayor wisely warned of in her dissent.

Why Is the Supreme Court Being So Obtuse?

The law as a profession is culturally conservative. It doesn’t like or appreciate being put in the position of dealing with novel questions of law, as cases are always supposed to be decidable via precedent—and precedent can only exist if a given situation has arisen before, or if there’s a close analogy to the situation locatable somewhere in the past.

Every historical analogue for what the Trump administration is doing right now, both within the United States and abroad, cries out for the Supreme Court to be extremely circumspect of the Trump administration’s current exercises of power. But for some reason, the conservative majority on the Court is okay with simultaneously (a) wrongly treating the present situation as unprecedented, and (b) nevertheless being sanguine about it. For these two manifestations of judicial temperament to arise concurrently is an extremely unusual circumstance in federal jurisprudence, and among conservative Justices it is unheard of when the President of the United States is a Democrat. But for Donald Trump, the Court’s conservative majority is willing to make an exception.

But what we’re also seeing, unfortunately, are some very smart rank-and-file attorneys who are still willing to presume that the Court will be as culturally conservative as the legal profession writ large—meaning that the Court will, as it should, eschew every opportunity to delegate new powers to the federal executive branch, especially when those powers would be anathema to the continuation of American democracy. That’s no longer a particularly good bet.

For instance, former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, a frequent MSNBC legal contributor, wrote on Bluesky that while the Court did technically rule for the Trump administration in the AEA case, the “quick deadline [it set] for the government’s brief [in the Garcia case] shows a sense of urgency. The government’s argument under Article II of the Constitution [in the Garcia case] is nonsense. I think it’s highly likely that the Supreme Court orders [Garcia’s] return. If not, then all is lost.”

Proof certainly agrees with McQuade that the only rational judicial determination here is Garcia’s immediate return to the United States. It also agrees that if this is not the determination the Supreme Court makes, America has entered a new authoritarian nightmare—as Trump, Vance, and Musk are sure to take a win in the Garcia case as a green light to begin disappearing anyone in the U.S. legally, including U.S. citizens.

What Proof is less sure of than McQuade is is that the Supreme Court will issue a sufficiently broad and clear ruling in the Garcia case to make clear to the Trump administration that nothing like this can ever happen again. Consider, that is, the opportunity the Supreme Court just had with the Venezuelan Hoax: it could have ordered the return to the United States, for proper due process, of all 278 of the now-held CECOT deportees. It didn’t. It treated the unimaginable harm done to those persons as somehow water under the bridge. And as we’ve seen, the Administration immediately took that judicial ruling exactly as any notorious bad actor would—as implicit license to keep breaking the law.

Just so, the Court could find a way to try to ensure that Mr. Garcia continues to rot in CECOT—essentially condemning him to permanent incarceration at best, and death at worst—while wagging its finger at the Trump administration and telling it not to be bad boys and girls ever again. If that’s what happens, it will further confirm to the Administration that it is always better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission—and will almost certainly lead to a massive expansion of its illegal deportation scheme.

On the other hand, the Court could find some esoteric basis to demand Mr. Garcia’s return while creating no rule or precedent for future Trump administration conduct. This seems unlikely, however, as it would require the Court caring about Garcia’s life more than it does about its own authority, which this Court almost certainly does not.

Or the Court could declare that the administration must present evidence of attempts to bring Garcia home, while acknowledging that the decision finally rests with Bukele.

If it does this—thereby conceding that the federal courts can only order attempts to retrieve a wrongfully deported person who’s now in foreign custody, it will at once be placing Trump’s claims of executive prerogative on foreign affairs above all else and signaling to the Trump administration that as long as it starts ignoring the federal courts entirely and kidnaps and trafficks people in the dead of night, the Court will reward it for that lawlessness by never doing more than giving it a slap on the wrist.

This is surely the result the Trump administration is hoping for.

A final possibility, assuming that a Court this far to the right is unlikely to simply shut down the entire Trump deportation operation wholesale, is that a slim conservative majority could treat the Garcia case as an outlier, demanding his return even as it sets a new rule for deportations that’s quite nearly exactly what Trump wants. In that case, the Trump administration might even be willing to go to the mat to get Garcia back, as both it and Bukele would understand that much bigger gains lay behind such a minor and transient concession. In other words, the two ends of the new international slave trade between the United States and Central America would now be sure that—going forward from the Garcia case—matters between them will be just as they have long wished them to be.

In any case, the fact that Nayib Bukele is making a visit to the United States to meet with President Trump on April 14, right around the time we would expect the Garcia matter to finally come to a head, suggests that Trump and Bukele want to be able to strategize face-to-face a cynical end-around to anything that emanates from the Court.

A Glimmer of Despair?

If it can be believed, the above analysis is the hopeful version of our near-term future.

Sadly, there are indications that it may be too hopeful by half.

It is well established in American jurisprudence that in any request for a temporary “stay” of a lower-court order, the “moving party” (that is, the party requesting of a higher court that it put a pause on a lower-court ruling) must show that it will suffer “irreparable harm” if it doesn’t get the judicial “relief” requested. Because the Trump administration lost, in the Garcia case, at both the district court level and the Circuit Court level—lost unanimously, in fact—it’s the “moving party” in the case before the Supreme Court. So it’s the Administration that must show that it would be irreparably harmed if Garcia is returned to America.

By granting the administration’s petition this past Monday, Justice Roberts found that returning Garcia to America by Monday at midnight would cause irreparable harm to the interests of the United States.

But how could Justice Roberts have found this? What harm—what conceivable harm—could a government face in simply undoing what it already admitted was a mistake?

Consider the following facts:

• It’s uncontested that Abrego Garcia is now facing imminent murder.

• It’s uncontested that if Garcia had been returned to America on Monday night, he could still have been removed to CECOT once again—at a later date—if he were found, after some subsequent federal hearing affording him proper due process, to be removable.

• It’s uncontested that Garcia has no criminal record, and that if returned to the United States he would remain in custody here—so there can be no claim by the Trump administration that Americans would be endangered by Garcia’s return.

• It’s therefore uncontested that bringing Garcia back to the United States would not foreclose any future options for the Trump Administration.

Indeed, the only party who anyone has claimed stands to be harmed by Abrego Garcia being returned to the United States is…

…El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele.

If this seems confusing to you, it should! The Trump administration has no standing (a legal term denoting the right to raise a claim in a particular place and at a particular time) to opine about potential harms to Bukele in federal court on Bukele’s behalf; it’s not at all clear why any U.S. presidential administration would, in any case, care more about a foreign dictator than a Maryland resident with three American kids. This case presents no conceivable harm to Bukele that a federal court could take notice of in any event, with the Trump administration at most suggesting that President Bukele could face “humiliation” or “political damage” from Abrego Garcia’s return—which of course makes no sense, as Bukele didn’t erroneously send Garcia to El Salvador, Trump did. Also, not for nothing, but the whole point of being a dictator, as Bukele is at great pains to admit he is, is that you don’t have to care about the public’s opinion (there’s a reason Bukele calls himself a “king” in his Twitter bio). Even beyond all of this, Trump and Bukele have announced their partnership as one that will unfold over many years, so shipping back just one deportee for further hearings in the United States is not only not damaging to that long-term relationship but exactly the sort of administrative solve we would expect that relationship to sometimes require (remember that Bukele, in his own country and under his own steam, has had to release from custody “several thousand” people he erroneously put there—so why would he feel any embarrassment or experience any political damage at having to, for once, fix someone else’s big error?)

On the other side of the ledger is Abrego Garcia: a man being held in El Salvador in violation of a string of federal orders the Supreme Court has seen and who is now in imminent danger of being murdered by the very people the federal judiciary (which Chief Justice John Roberts is the leader of) promised to keep him safe from in writing.

And yet Justice Roberts found that the Trump administration faces irreparable harm.

This is a very, very bad sign for American democracy.

Worse still, there’s only one possible explanation for it that this attorney can provide.

Chief Justice Roberts must believe that at least four members of his Court are willing to adopt the morally, ethically, politically, and legally obscene doctrine the Trump administration is now pushing: that once any resident of America deported from U.S. soil by the Trump administration lands on El Salvadoran soil—or perhaps even once any person enters El Salvadoran airspace; or perhaps even once any person is put on a plane that has left the ground in the United States and is on its way to El Salvador—that person is in the custody of Nayib Bukele. If the Supreme Court is prepared to adopt this bizarre way of thinking, (a) it must believe that returning Garcia could indeed cause an international incident constituting “harm” to the Trump administration and U.S. interests, (b) it’s planning to pave with gold the road to a Trump administration program under which Donald Trump’s political enemies are permanently exiled and sent to die in CECOT, and (c) it is—without any precedent in American jurisprudence—designating the Garcia case a sort of bona fide international crisis, rather than seeing in it an own goal by a presidential administration already infamous for them.

So while there’s a glimmer of hope that the Supreme Court will move quickly to order the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States, this glimmer must remain, for now, only a glimmer. Not because it’s unlikely that five of the nine justices will rule for Garcia—the odds at this point are likely even—or even because Garcia is certain to be killed before the Supreme Court can rule (as in theory Bukele could either ensure that, or ensure its prevention, if he wished to), but for a far more troubling reason: it’s not clear that the Trump Administration will honor any adverse ruling from the Court.

Why? Because the moment Court stupidly concedes that this case is an international crisis, it provides President Trump with the rhetorical ammunition he needs to turn that international crisis into a constitutional crisis as well. In other words, if the Court admits that the Abrego Garcia case is an judicially cognizable international crisis, it’s implicitly encouraging President Trump in his belief that only he can resolve such a crisis because only he has been designated by the U.S. Constitution to handle foreign affairs.

In this way, the Court’s ongoing game of pattycake with Trump—always humoring his worst delusions, even when they’re grotesque and dangerous—could finally go off the rails completely, with Trump deciding that even a Supreme Court ruling that explicitly condemns his actions actually justifies them in the dicta (the legal term for language in a ruling that isn’t expressly related to the ruling itself) by way of conceding that this case falls into Donald Trump’s constitutional domain as President of the United States.

If that sounds like an obscure outcome, remember that it’s precisely the “theory of the case” that the Trump administration is currently proceeding under. At every turn, every Trump agent who has spoken about the administration’s deportation scheme has said that it’s entirely the president’s prerogative and shouldn’t be subject to any judicial review. Indeed, this is why the first nearly 300 deportees were kidnapped and trafficked abroad under cover of darkness: because Trump, Miller, Homan, and their agents in ICE didn’t think any court, including the Supreme Court, should have a say in it. Homan, the immigration czar for the administration, is even on record as saying,

“I don’t care what judges think. I don’t care what that judge thinks as far as this case. We’re going to continue to arrest public safety threats and national security threats. We’re going to continue to deport them from the United States.”

Could the Trump administration be any clearer on what it thinks its constitutional powers are, and how aggressively it will continue to pursue them, whatever courts say?

An International Crisis Becomes a Constitutional Crisis

So why is it so important to the Trump Administration to take the position that any person resident in America who it kidnaps and trafficks across national borders is no longer under federal judicial jurisdiction the very moment their plane lifts into the air?

And why is it not just important to the Trump Administration to take this position, but so important that it’s willing to risk the instant constitutional crisis that would result if it tells the Supreme Court—as its agents, including Miller and Bondi, have been saying they will no matter what the Court decides—that it cannot honor any order to return Abrego Garcia to America because that would be logistically impossible (as allegedly only Nayib Bukele can order such a result)?

Why, indeed, is it so very important to the second Trump Administration that all the above be the case that it has now adopted the previously reported-on Davis Doctrine, publicly asserting that all matters of “foreign policy” and “international affairs” and transnational-migration-related “terrorism” must necessarily fall outside the scope of even the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States?

Put more simply, why couldn’t the Trump administration just ask Mr. Bukele to return Garcia and end this entire standoff without loss of life, a constitutional crisis, or any more clearly damaging news coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian bent? If Donald Trump were to simply make a single phone call to Bukele, he would look like a man willing to admit an error; Bukele would be able to frame himself as a generous and understanding ally of America; Abrego Garcia would return to safety and his family and kids; and this whole matter would, at least in theory—if rather fraudulently—put a new face on what’s otherwise been a lawless deportation scheme.

Is it truly the case that Trump’s unwillingness to admit a mistake explains all of this?

That seems unlikely.

More likely is that all this is happening because President Trump very much intends to start sending all sorts of people to El Salvador who’ve no business being sent there, including many people whose claim to remain in the United States is even stronger than Abrego Garcia’s is. If that’s so, Trump would want to establish right now—before he uses martial law sometime in late April or May to achieve the same result, but by fiat—that he has Court-granted authority to do what he’s already planning to do. That is, if he can get the Court to “obey in advance” and bow to his authoritarian designs, despite there being no discernible legal basis for it, why not reach for that brass ring?

After all, if or when President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act over all matters relating to immigration and terrorism—consistent with the advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that he is expecting to receive on April 20 (and likely explicitly asked for in advance) pursuant to an Inauguration Day executive order—and if or when this false invocation is quickly expanded by the Trump administration’s adoption of the Davis Doctrine, wrenching it to include executive-fiat powers not only for immigration and terrorism issues but anything arguably falling under international affairs and foreign policy, not only will Mr. Trump effectively be a dictator in the United States (as his friend Nayib Bukele already is in El Salvador) but he’ll be able to sell his political enemies to Bukele at will without the intercession of judges in either country.

But wouldn’t it be even better if he did have their approval?

Hence Donald Trump’s approach to the Garcia case.

It would be far easier, both rhetorically and logistically, for Trump to do all this with the blessing of the Supreme Court. And given that this Supreme Court is as far to the right as any in modern American political history, and given its specific recent history of both granting Mr. Trump unprecedented powers and assuring him that he cannot be criminally charged for anything he claims is part of a core presidential function—see where this is going?—why not fish for language in a Supreme Court majority opinion that avers that immigration, counterterrorism, foreign policy, and orchestration of international affairs broadly writ is all part of the core job of a president? If the Court concedes this, Trump will have all the assurance he needs that even if he sends his political enemies into exile as supposed “terrorists,” and even if he somehow loses all his political power in 2028 or thereafter, Trump v. United States will protect him from a post-presidency federal criminal prosecution.

Either way, the unprecedented executive powers Donald Trump is now seeking—not in a month, not in a year, not at the end of his second term, not sometime in a still notional third term, but right now, as in this week—would put him in a prime position to start wrongly arresting, detaining, and permanently exiling his political enemies this year. He could move from ideation to execution, in other words, a process that his co-POTUS Elon Musk and Attorney General Pam Bondi have already begun on TV and social media, with all three of these radicals preposterously accusing opponents of acts of domestic terrorism. Trump could gain useful cover for his plan to tell voters that he had to send his enemies to CECOT in the middle of the night because it was part of his duty to safeguard the nation.

And, he’d add, now that they’re in the custody of Nayid Bukele, they can only return if he wills it… and you know what? Somehow (one imagines Donald Trump whispering in a stage aside) I don’t think he will.

These are the stakes in the Abrego Garcia case. That the Trump-El Salvador Scandal is far more serious than even the ongoing tariff issue that corporate media is focusing all its attention on should now be clear.

Conclusion

So what happens now? Well, we wait. And if past is precedent, the Supreme Court will move with exaggerated judiciousness—as it’s done in nearly every case it’s heard thus far involving Donald Trump.

For its part, the Trump administration will likewise try to drag its heels as much as possible—and, as noted above, possibly for the most disgusting reason imaginable.

The terrifying reality, here, is that the simplest solution, for both Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, is for some CECOT prisoner in El Salvador to seek favor with his jailers, and perhaps even a clandestine release from custody, by murdering Abrego Garcia before the Supreme Court can issue its ruling. This would render the Garcia case moot, and save Trump and Bukele from the risk that America’s highest court conclusively rules that their cherished international slave-trading scheme is illegal.

If Garcia stays alive, it’s nevertheless the case that any decision the Supreme Court reaches this coming week or next will be moot once Trump adopts—as he’s expected to do—a recommendation from his two leading sycophants to the effect that he should immediately employ the Insurrection Act to legalize much of what he planned to do anyway.

And it’s here, at the conclusion of this harrowing narrative, that things must suddenly start to get more confusing.

Why? Because we must speak now of The Great Replacement Theory, the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Elon Musk has been obsessed with for years and has recently taken to once again spouting at every opportunity (after briefly acknowledging it as erroneous and antisemitic two years ago). Great Replacement Theory is relevant to the Garcia case because it represents the foremost attempt by the MAGA bloc in America to link Democratic Party politics—including the actions of Democratic politicians, Democratic protesters, and the Democratic Party domestic political agenda broadly writ—with mass immigration to the United States by undocumented persons, the very phenomenon Trump has recently reclassified as an “invasion” by “foreign terrorists.”

Musk’s near-daily-stated view is that there’s a vast left-wing conspiracy between the Democratic Party and its donors to aid and abet mass undocumented immigration to the United States. He says the plan is to ply these immigrants with government funds illicitly, then legalize them as grateful Democratic voters, and then use the changing demographics of the nation to ensure that “woke” ideology becomes an institutional fixture in America.

In the usual telling of this wild conspiracy theory, the donors behind all of this are mostly Jews—hence the entirely correct statement that Great Replacement Theory is just another antisemitic conspiracy theory about eldritch “globalists” secretly aiming to destroy us all.

In other words, the theory, as Elon Musk frames it, holds that powerful Democrats—in the Congress, in the media, in academia, in the Democrats’ donor class, inside the Democratic party apparatus—are actively aiding and abetting terrorism (as remember, Trump has officially reclassified conventional illegal immigration as a “foreign invasion” by “terrorists,” at once putting immigration in the realms of terrorism and foreign policy and international affairs, precisely the spheres of American life Trump says no court can oversee).

In this fashion, both Trump and Musk are workshopping the idea that their U.S.-citizen political opponents are in fact terrorists who can be permanently exiled to a death camp in El Salvador.

While Pam Bondi, the person who’d be executing such a dystopian vision of America’s future, isn’t quite there yet, she’s getting close. So far, she’s limited herself to “only” calling petty vandalism against Tesla vehicles “an act of domestic terrorism.”

But she’s well aware, surely, that the man she’s seeking to protect with her vitriol—Musk—has gone much further than this, publicly demanding incarceration over the “terror” caused by Democratic Party donors or Democratic Party-affiliated nonprofits that may have helped organize or fund peaceful protests against Musk companies and the Trump Administration.

{Note: You might expect that Musk distinguishes between peaceful protests against Tesla and attacks against Tesla property. He doesn’t appear to, on the grounds that both cost him money.}

Since Musk began taking this position, it’s become a common refrain among MAGAs on social media that any formalized organizing evident in or around leftist protests is somehow a criminal, even terroristic act. Of course, in MAGA-world this new standard applies only to their political opponents; any MAGA event can be funded or organized by whomever—for instance, the events of January 6, 2021, which resulted in death and destruction and were provably orchestrated with the aid of the Trump administration despite those events constituting actual violent domestic terrorism.

It’s against this larger backdrop that we now find the Trump Administration, and particularly its most radical figures—like Miller, Musk, Holman, and Trump himself—trying to establish the broadest imaginable authority for exiling to CECOT anyone in the United States they deem undesirable. (Recall that the grotesque policial ad linked to above, in which Secretary Noem broadly threatens anyone who enters the United States without proper documentation with permanent incarceration, is a new would-be carve-out in what would otherwise be illegal “cruel and unusual punishment.”)

Just today—Wednesday, April 9—White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt used exactly the same language in detailing the U.S. citizens Trump wants in CECOT that she previously has used to describe the 238 Venezuelan migrants Trump sent there.

The message in this is clear: Trump and his team will always claim that anyone they send to CECOT, whether an undocumented migrant or an American citizen, is a violent threat to America—a terrorist, even—and therefore deserving of being caged like livestock for the rest of their natural life. As with the Venezuelan Hoax, this will almost always be a lie. It will also be a lie Trump’s administration finds ways to ensure no court can review. After all, it apparently reasons, what can’t Trump do so long as he claims he’s ensuring “domestic tranquility”?

All that remains, now, is for an attorney who is known to be corrupt—Pam Bondi—to expand her current definition of “domestic terrorism” committed by U.S. citizens to include additional minor, historically non-terroristic (non-felony) property offenses that she and her Department of Justice, along with Trump lawyer Kash Patel’s FBI, can fraudulently treat as terrorism worthy of overnight, process-free exile to CECOT.

Yet incredibly, there’s an even broader context than this for the particularly dangerous three-week period American jurisprudence is in now.

After recklessly pulling out of the First Iran Nuclear Deal—not because it wasn't working fine, but because it’d been negotiated by a man he hates, Barack Obama—Trump has now given the Iranian government, which had formally committed itself (somewhat understandably) to no longer negotiating with a U.S. president who already reneged on a prior contract, a deadline of this Saturday to come to a new accord over its nuclear program. He’s implied that the United States could launch military strikes against Iran at any time if an agreement is not reached by this Saturday (April 12).

On the same day he issued this new threat against Israel’s sworn geopolitical enemy, Trump met at the White House with Israeli president and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, ostensibly to discuss (a) the modest tariffs Trump had levelled against the Middle Eastern nation and (b) recent events in Gaza (which candidly Trump has been disinterested in ever since his idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza and then turn it into a playpen for rich Westerners was universally derided), but almost certainly in reality to discuss how Israeli airstrikes against Iran last October carefully paved the way for a joint U.S.-Israeli air bombardment of Iran’s nuclear facilities sometime in the coming weeks.

Indeed, Trump darkly announced that Iran would be “in great danger” if it did not submit to him this week.

What Americans therefore have to look forward to in the coming days—essentially from today through the beginning of summer—is a period of time in which Donald Trump is likely to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law; either launch airstrikes against or even declare an unofficial war against Iran; and significantly expand an illicit exile program that he’s now defending before the Supreme Court.

Of course, predictions are silly. No one knows the future. So perhaps none of these things will come to pass. But if we look not only at what Trump and his agents are saying but what they are actually doing, it certainly appears that this is the series of near-term outcomes they’re presently preparing for.

Unfortunately, by granting a stay to the Trump administration in the Garcia case, Chief Justice Roberts has made clear that he not only has no idea whatsoever of who he’s dealing with, or what he’s dealing with, but that he’s insensate to the profound danger the United States is in in the run-up to its president almost certainly taking steps to establish himself as a dictator—or at least a dictator in the encompassing spheres of immigration, terrorism, foreign policy, and international affairs, spheres he and his agents are already busy redefining to the point that they touch on every aspect of American life. (Certainly, President Trump’s decision to leave the nation he leads utterly defenseless against foreign intrusions into our elections is a sign that he has little interest in seeing “free and fair” elections in the United States going forward.)

What was needed in the Garcia case was for the Court to quickly and unambiguously affirm every lower-court judge who’s heard the case, and bring the case to a head by midnight this past Monday—thereby averting the international and constitutional crisis Trump, Bukele, and Musk effectively conspired together to create. Chief Justice Roberts doing so would’ve put before the American people and the federal judiciary the urgent question of whether the second Trump administration is willing to recant its apparent intention to exile political dissidents and honor federal judicial rulings.

And it would have done so before any false invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Instead, with events in Iran, events in El Salvador, and increasing global instability caused by Trump’s untutored, whiplash-inducing handling of U.S. tariffs on foreign goods—and with the April 20 deadline for the Hegseth-Gabbard Report, which is almost certain to urge President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act—matters in the United States are fast approaching a rolling boil. It appears the Supreme Court will soon discover, along with the rest of America, just how much detention, death, and destruction the second Trump administration plans to provoke throughout 2025.

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Introduction

During the first Trump administration, Donald Trump signed a ghastly deal—one that President Joe Biden quickly withdrew from—that agreed to send U.S. deportees into the custody of brutal far-right El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, an ally of the Trump family, rather than back to their home countries.

The deal was an example of the 1980s-born, oddly named, much criticized “Safe Third Country” (STC) principle, in which a nation can designate a country that’s not a given deportee’s home country as a safe place for them to seek asylum instead of the country they originally applied to. Historically, the most obviously noxious deployments of this institutionalized fiction at the heart of the international migration framework have come when a nation—in the case of Donald Trump, the United States—chooses to designate as a “safe third country” a country that is obviously unsafe.

Under Bukele, who illegally seized a new term as El Salvador’s president in exactly the way we now know Donald Trump wishes to, and who’s in a highly public bromance with American co-POTUS Elon Musk, crime in the relatively poor Central American nation has gone down and the economy up—at the expense of virtually everything else that makes life worth living, including, most notably, the freedom of El Salvador’s citizens. Despite Musk making clear that he wants Bukele’s brutal authoritarianism to come to the United States as a panacea for everything he dislikes about the nation he apparently illegally became a citizen of in the 1990s, the reality of life under Bukele is best summarized by this investigative report in the New Yorker. It includes harrowing paragraphs like this one:

On a recent night, I was speaking with a woman named [fictitious name used to protect her identity from Bukele], whose husband had been arrested during a work break at a taxi stand in a town near San Salvador. He and his employee were eating pupusas on the street, and, when a cook from the food stall walked over to collect their money, a group of officers converged on the three of them. The charge was “illegal gathering.”

A jealous neighbor may have called in a tip—Karen’s husband had never been arrested, and he was a fixture at their local church. He had also enthusiastically voted for Bukele in 2019.

Baffled, Karen tried everything, including speaking to local reporters to publicize the case, but nothing changed. When she first told me the story, we were hunched over a small table in the food court of a mall, her face teary.

That’s right: the world Musk and now (see infra) Donald Trump want to recreate in North America is one in which anyone can be “disappeared” off the street at any time.

When Trump made his deal with Bukele during his first term, its premise was that the men, women, and children he would be deporting from American soil to the territory of a brutal far-right dictator would be nonviolent migrants seeking political asylum—that is, safety from proven dangers in their home countries—and that El Salvador would, in the spirit of such asylum requests, welcome these migrants with open arms. Indeed, the idea was that the migrants would eventually become eligible to be El Salvadorans.

From the start, the premise was a flawed one, in part because it relied on a tyrant who not only has “suspended civil liberties” in El Salvador but is widely reported to be “secretly negotiating with” the very same murderous gangs he claims to be cleaning up—meaning that he’s a criminal himself, and merely uses disingenuous rhetoric on criminal justice (this will sound familiar to all American voters) as a means to stay in power. Per the New York Times, Nayib Bukele is particularly infamous worldwide for “carrying out mass arrests,” “bypassing due process,” and “ensnaring people who have no gang ties” in his due process-less mass arrests. This hardly makes him a good candidate to take in thousands and thousands of impoverished foreign migrants he hasn’t personally vetted; as CBS News noted (without, oddly, seeing the flashing red lights in its own phrasing) Bukele promised Trump he would “house” (how was not specified) all asylum-seekers deported from the United States, a promise that by 2025 had turned into an acknowledgment by the same news organization that Bukele would be “incarcerating” all persons sent to him by Trump, not just any “criminals” America deported but all “deportees,” a population that includes asylum-seekers who’ve done nothing wrong and are merely fleeing persecution. In fact, yet another CBS report found that of the 238 alleged Venezuelan gang (Tren de Aragua) members recently sent to CECOT for life imprisonment, “most” were merely “migrants” who had “no criminal records”—a fact that didn’t stop Trump from condemning them all to life imprisonment and didn’t stop Bukele from being the executor of that grotesque atrocity.

Even at the time of the First Trump-Bukele Accord in 2019, American media noted that Trump was pushing innocent asylum-seekers into “one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” in fact a nation so unsafe that Trump administration officials privately conceded it didn’t and couldn’t qualify as a proper “safe third country” deal—but only an “asylum cooperation agreement”—due to the unsuitability of El Salvador for any asylum-seeker.

These officials also acknowledged (and even more grotesquely, in retrospect) that they were deporting these innocents to a nation without any asylum system, as the U.S. would need to “help [Bukele] build an asylum system in El Salvador.” This left wide open the question of what the infamously incarceration-happy Bukele would do with a massive influx of unvetted migrants to his carefully controlled authoritarian ecosystem. That question didn’t seem to trouble Donald Trump at all, however, on the longstanding principle—one imagines—of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Yet Trump knew in 2019 that his ally Bukele had long seen migration through the lens of law enforcement rather than humanitarianism, with the New York Times reporting in 2019 that Bukele “has deployed hundreds of security forces and immigration agents to [El Salvador’s] border to help curb the flow of migrants bound for Mexico and the United States.”

Meanwhile, Bukele himself has made clear that he doesn’t want back the 200,000 El Salvadorans currently in America on “TPS” (“Temporary Protected Status”) status, which needless to say would have underscored for Trump in 2019 that the far-right dictator also doesn’t want new non-Salvadoran migrants roaming free in El Salvador.

With all this in mind, one imagines that when President Biden withdrew from this dodgy arrangement it wasn’t just because it was a fake “safe third country” pact; not just because El Salvador is no place for women and children fleeing persecution in their home countries; not just because of Bukele’s horrifying human rights record; but more broadly because Bukele was unwilling to make any representation to the U.S. government that he would meaningfully distinguish between categories of deportees.

Then Donald Trump won reelection last November, and a new vicious circle began.

The Second Trump-Bukele Accord(s)

The Biden-discarded First Trump-Bukele Accord was revived in January 2025, during the first week of the second Trump administration—though now with significant new complexities, in acknowledgment of the fact that it could not be undone for at least four years. (In other words, Trump and Bukele now had all the runway they needed to grievously mishandle not just hundreds of thousands but millions of innocents, letting new layers of conceptual and structural complexity enter their previous negotiations.)

Because a Trump-Bukele accord had existed previously—and was, if one didn’t pay any attention to the details, merely part of a string of such agreements Trump had sought during his first administration with various Central America countries (e.g., Honduras and Guatemala)—the revival of the original Trump-Bukele negotiations deal caused less reflection among major media than might have been expected. It was, after all, at least vaguely reminiscent of the sort of “safe third country” arrangements that have been common in international diplomacy for almost fifty years. That what Trump and Bukele (a would-be dictator and the still fairly newly minted dictator) had agreed to was something else entirely was apparently lost on almost everyone.

As already implied, a key distinction in the second set of Trump-Bukele negotiations was the nature of Bukele’s devolving rule and his intentions for those entering his country. As the Associated Press reports, it’s not merely Bukele’s new “CECOT” maximum security prison—which allows no visitation, recreation, education, media coverage, or prisoner releases (ever)—being draconian to the point of raising human rights concerns, but in fact the “stark, harsh prisons [that are] a trademark” of the man’s tyranny across El Salvador. Indeed, given that El Salvador only has a population the size of Maryland, and given that CECOT can house “40,000” inmates, it’s unclear how many other prisons El Salvador needs or even has. The Conversation reports that there are “110,000” total prisoners in El Salvador, but given that Mr. Bukele oversees a prison system with hundreds of prison murders annually; that CECOT prisoners are never allowed outside and are told in advance that they’ll die in CECOT, contributing to a likely high suicide rate (further enabled by the fact that each CECOT prisoner is projected to eventually receive, once the prison is at maximum capacity, “less than two feet of space in their cells”); and the seeming inevitability that Bukele will soon have the funds, possibly through his dealings with Trump, to build a “CECOT 2,” it seems clear that in relatively short order most or all El Salvadoran prisoners will be in the very same CECOT conditions that would constitute clear civil rights violations in America.

But a second distinction pertains to Bukele’s philosophy of law enforcement, which is discussed in detail in the 2025 Proof Series book Proof of Destruction. In a manner that is representative of the plot of the 2002 dystopian film Minority Report, Bukele appears to believe that crimes that have not yet occurred can be sniffed out in advance. To this end, he gregariously arrests any he believes might commit a crime at some time in the future, doing so without due process and then caging that person for the rest of their natural lives. This psychopathic exercise in institutional sadism is of course a massive human rights violation—even as Elon Musk implies publicly (see Proof of Destruction) that he wants the same system used in America—but on a more banal level it simply indicates a deranged autocrat who thinks not in terms of persons but classes of persons.

In his public comments on criminal justice, Bukele identifies classes of persons who—per dodgy data of uncertain origin or accuracy—are more likely to commit crimes than others, again a delusion that was already a subject for dystopian film in America decades ago. Bukele almost certainly would place unvetted foreign migrants without any money or job prospects, who are entering a nation (again) without any actual asylum system, as being in this “class” of likely criminals. This underscores that every woman, man, and child Donald Trump deports to El Salvador is at risk of entering a CECOT-like form of permanent caging.

{Note: Elon Musk’s public embrace of institutional sadism of the sort described above may be seen as a microcosm of how his friend—and apparent model, at least on the subject of blue-collar law enforcement—Nayib Bukele thinks. At various points over the last few years, as discussed in the Elon Musk section of this publication, the Tesla CEO has implied foreseeable criminality amongst almost every class of American citizen widely known for criticizing him, from members of antifa to anyone involved in the Indivisible nonprofit organizing unit, from Democratic members of Congress to the editors at countless major-media publications, from undocumented persons to urban-dwelling Black Americans, from any Democratic Party voter who attends a public protest to any transgender person. In short, one of many reasons Musk is routinely termed a would-be “fascist” by his critics is that he has strongly implied—repeatedly, on social media and in interviews and in speeches and at rallies—that if he had his druthers a large percentage of the U.S. population would be incarcerated as a preventative measure. In this context, fearing that his pal Bukele would incarcerate nonviolent migrants seems a rather conservative analysis.}

While all the foregoing was already in the water in January 2025, by the end of that month the Musk-Trump Axis still hadn’t formally re-entered into Trump’s first-term deal with Bukele—nor had that deal been extended to include not just nonviolent migrants all ostensibly (but not really) intended to become El Salvadoran citizens somewhere down the line but individuals currently incarcerated in America for violent crimes. The reason for this delay in re-formalizing the First Trump-Bukele Accord was that, consistent with his apparent plan to ramp up the extremism of every one of his failed first-term domestic and foreign policies (e.g., the so-called “Muslim travel ban”), Trump clearly wanted a second Trump-Bukele accord to be much bigger and bolder than the first.

And this is where the meat of our story begins.

The Trump-Bukele Bromance Is Rekindled

By the end of January 2025, Trump had dispatched his Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss with President Bukele entering into three simultaneous deals with America—reminiscent, for those who follow the U.S. Congress closely, of Trump’s preference for Congress to pass “one big beautiful bill” encompassing his entire domestic agenda rather than passing that veritable smorgasbord of legislative maneuvers piecemeal.

The problems with this plan—as with Trump’s would-be “beautiful bill”—were many:

1. Mr. Trump does not understand what “asylum” means. As has been repeatedly reported—see here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance—it really does seem that Trump doesn’t understand what “seeking asylum” means, as he conflates it with a term widely used (for what we now call psychiatric wards) when Trump was younger: insane asylums. Indeed, Trump appears to almost never discuss the women, men, and children seeking asylum in the U.S. without falsely, alleging, without any evidence whatsoever, that most of them are either criminals, criminally insane, former mental-hospital patients, or simply persons previously identified by their home governments as undesirables (likely, or so Trump often implies, due to their supposed mental-health issues). While it’s been explained to Trump many times, surely, that all this is false, it’s so politically advantageous for him to accuse foreign countries—particularly majority-minority countries in South America or Central America—of sending dangerously unstable and/or violent persons to the United States as part of an international left-wing plot to unleash non-white violence on conservative white Americans that the president has clearly come to believe his own delusion (as well as applaud the way his co-president, Musk, spends nearly all day drilling down on the vicious slander that migrants commit crimes at higher rates than citizens, rather than far lower ones).

2. Mr. Trump therefore likely cannot distinguish between the three very different types of deals Rubio and Bukele were negotiating in January 2025. Our proof of this is not merely that Trump appears to believe anyone seeking “asylum” is per se dangerous, but also the fact that, like Bukele and Musk, Trump habitually uses disingenuous rhetoric on criminal justice to flatten many necessary distinctions between different classes of persons, and for that matter different variations of crimes and criminals. In the near-daily legally inaccurate words of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, anyone in the U.S. in violation of civil statutes that require documentation is a “criminal”; anyone who’s a member of a gang, with or without a criminal record, is likewise a “criminal”; and, in an echo of Trump’s personal lawyer Pam Bondi—who has the title of “Attorney General” but appears to still be merely a Trump legal adviser and advocate—anyone who commits even petty vandalism against property associated with a high-profile Republican is a “terrorist.” Just as CECOT is designated by Bukele as a prison for “terrorists” but seems to be ready to hold basically anyone who Bukele wants to punish with permanent caging, one of Trump’s first actions in his second term was to falsely declare numerous majority-minority, foreign-born gangs “foreign terrorist organizations” so that anyone even distantly associated with them, even U.S. citizens, could be called a “terrorist.” In practice, this clearly counterfactual declaration meant that in the second Trump era an individual could be deemed a terrorist (a person intent on publicly achieving political ends through violent means) even if (a) they’d done no more than send a single email to a member of an “FTO,” (b) they’d never committed any crimes in the United States, (c) they’d denied being in any FTO but had been identified as a member purely on the basis of potentially innocuous tattoos or garb, or (d) they’d in no way met the definition of an actual “terrorist”—as even an active, self-admitted gang member who’s at some point committed a charged or uncharged violent crime in America as part of the loose, almost entirely disconnected underworld of foreign gangs in the U.S. is in no sense doing so as a political statement or to enact political change. (Indeed, the most common victims of such gang members are other gang members and members of other gangs, not the white American civilians without a gang affiliation the new Trump administration implies he’s protecting.)

3. Mr. Bukele also appears incapable of making, or unwilling to make, the category distinctions that the several arrangements he wants to make with Trump require. A true “safe third country” agreement between the United States and Bukele would require of the latter something he’s never indicated even a modicum of interest in: offering a path to legal residence and even citizenship for foreign migrants he knows nothing about beyond the fact that they sought non-pre-authorized entry to the United States. Bukele isn’t an autocrat avidly seeking to increase his nation’s modest population, but rather to reduce it through both incarceration and fending off American attempts to return 200,000 TPS-eligible El Salvadorans; he’s exhibited no interest in having El Salvador become a melting pot of different migrants’ cultures, but the opposite: he seeks a homogeneous land whose residents conform to his expectations for them (all the way down to, as Proof and others have previously reported, the length of their hair). Bukele’s views of asylum, migration, diversity, and terrorism in this respect match those of Musk and Trump, not a leader interested in providing safe harbor for the suffering.

4. El Salvador is too poor a nation, at present, to handle asylum-seekers humanely. Perhaps in part because it’s a brutal far-right autocracy whose autocratic leader is a murderous sociopath, El Salvador is relatively poor. It ranks 116th worldwide in wealth, putting it on par with nations such as Bhutan, Namibia, and Iraq. There is no evidence whatsoever that it’s in a position to welcome with open arms hundreds of thousands of migrants from America—persons who originally hailed from many different nations, some of them not on friendly terms with El Salvador—nor even, as noted above, that the nation has any asylum system in place at all. The women, men, and children Trump wants to send to Bukele have no jobs or money and in some instances little education or training. The very reason Bukele has become known for CECOT, a horrifying death trap, and not for running a rich South or Central American nation—like, say, Chile, Uruguay, or Costa Rica (nations that rank #66, #67, and #69 in global wealth respectively)—is because he’s not managing a vibrant economy but a tightly controlled prison camp in which the 6.3 million El Salvadorans under his thumb know that if they step out of line they’ll be sent to die in CECOT or an equally deadly prison. Just as Americans wouldn’t even imagine that sending migrants to Iraq makes sense, we shouldn’t think of El Salvador as a sensible safe harbor for anyone. Clearly, President Trump only pretends otherwise because he wants to make a deal with his friend Bukele that at once allows him to send Bukele money and undesirables, elevates Bukele’s reputation on the world stage, augments the status of his relationship with the U.S., and develops a new precedent for how America deals with non-white migrants (not the politically conservative white ones Trump warmly welcomes).

But it gets worse.

And it gets worse because, beyond sending Bukele asylum-seekers and individuals he claims—often falsely—are foreign-born criminals, Donald Trump wants to seal a third type of deal with Bukele. It’s a very different type of deal than the first two (even as the first two are very different from one another), yet in keeping with the analysis above it’s also a deal Trump wrongly treats as identical to the two others already described.

Around the time that Marco Rubio was in El Salvador negotiating with Bukele early in 2025, President Trump revealed that this third type of deal would involve sending to El Salvador imprisoned American citizens for the duration of their incarceration, with the United States paying “a small fee [per prisoner]” (a nod to how the handshake deal involving foreign-born alleged criminals was handled, with the first such reported transfer boasting a miniscule $6 million annual fee for 300 prisoners, or $20,000 per annum per prisoner; by comparison, the U.S. spends well over twice that amount).

While Trump and Rubio are only proposing sending Bukele “a small fee per prisoner,” the fact that just the first “prisoner” shipment to El Salvador involved 300 persons—who, over a presumed 30-year average stay at CECOT before death, would see the U.S. sending $180 million to El Salvador for just those inmates alone—confirms that in its totality the deal Trump seeks with Bukele would involve the transfer of tens of billions of dollars to a far-right autocracy known for civil rights and human rights violations.

Needless to say, the less Bukele spends of this money on prisoners, the more he can keep for himself. And given that the United States spends $43,000 per annum per prisoner to house human beings humanely, do we really think Bukele is spending $20,000 per annum per prisoner to give each prisoner under two feet of living space?

Of course not. That amount of space per prisoner—with the lack of any recreation, education, visitation, outdoor time, or small-occupancy cells—costs considerably less.

So even before anyone considers the Trump-Bukele asylum-seeker deal, or the Trump-Bukele incarcerated-U.S. citizen deal, the “FTO” (“Foreign Terrorist Organization”) deal that the two men have already launched—and are presumably now working on formalizing—will result in billions and billions of dollars in profit for Nayib Bukele.

But added to the FTO deal are, indeed, two other types of deals, with the full slate of three U.S.-El Salvador arrangements itemized below.

The Second Trump-Bukele Accord(s)

(1) The STC Deal

Affects: Migrant Asylum-Seekers
Are Affected Persons Violent: No
Are Affected Persons Criminals: No
Will They Return to America: No
Who Holds Jurisdiction Over Them Once Deported: El Salvador

(2) The FTO Deal

Affects: Alleged Foreign-Born Gang Members Now in the United States
Are Affected Persons Violent: Maybe
Are Affected Persons Criminals: Maybe
Will They Return to America: No
Who Holds Jurisdiction Over Them Once Deported: El Salvador

(3) The BOP Deal (“Federal Bureau of Prisons”)

Affects: American Citizens
Are Affected Persons Violent: Maybe
Are Affected Persons Criminals: Yes
Will They Return to America: Yes
Who Holds Jurisdiction Over Them Once Deported: United States

The issues we already see in the data above are these:

1. All persons currently in the United States and under U.S. jurisdiction enjoy the protections of the Eighth Amendment, which means they cannot be sent to any prison Nayib Bukele runs.

2. Donald Trump cannot legally send any U.S. citizens abroad for incarceration.

3. There is no evidence that Trump or Bukele are distinguishing carefully between the terms of these three deals as Proof has just helpfully done above.

All three of these issues—and there are many others to boot—are deal-breakers.

But the second Trump administration not only acknowledges none of these, or any issues at all, but—again—makes no distinction between the three arrangements above.

The Plot Thickens—and Darkens Considerably

If we accept—as should not be difficult—that what we are dealing with in both the U.S. and El Salvador right now are far-right administrations that care so little about any of the classes of people above, and understand (or choose to understand) so little about key legal distinctions between the classes of persons above with respect to both the U.S. immigration system and the U.S. criminal justice system, that the desire or ability of these administrations and president to distinguish between the deals above approaches nil, what atrocities might we expect from such administrations and men?

(1) A blending or “bleeding over” of all persons and categories referenced above.

So, for instance, we would expect to hear the President of the United States repeatedly imply that (1) many non-violent migrants are in fact violent; (2) all gang members are criminals whether they have criminal records or not; (3) some persons who dress like gang members or simply know gang members are in fact gang members when they are not; (4) all gang members are “terrorists,” when by the conventional definition of the latter term almost none are; and (5) Bukele would therefore be in the right to issue life sentences to everyone he receives from the U.S. under the FTO Deal and BOP Deal.

(2) A juxtaposition of the terms physical custody and legal custody.

Anyone who knows anything about family court in the United States is aware that physical custody of a person and legal custody of that person sometimes but not always overlap. For instance, a child removed from a home for the child’s safety has been taken into the physical custody of a governmental body even if the parental rights of the child’s parents haven’t yet been terminated or in any way abridged—meaning that they still have legal custody of the (now-absent) child.

Just so, following a divorce two former spouses may share legal custody of a child of the marriage even if one of them is awarded full physical custody of the child. The latter term relates to who has dominion over a body, and the former to who has a vested legal interest in the body.

When Trump began musing, in January, about sending not just asylum-seekers to El Salvador but also two classes of incarcerated persons—foreign-born inmates and U.S.-born inmates—he not only was creating a constitutional crisis (because both of these conveyances would arguably violate the Eighth Amendment, with the latter also likely violating the Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Sixth Amendment) but in very real and immediate terms a custodial crisis.

{Note: The author of this report is a longtime criminal defense attorney and current member in good standing with both the New Hampshire Bar Association and the Federal Bar for the District of New Hampshire. Nothing in this report should be taken as legal advice directed to or for any person or class of persons; if you require an attorney, contact one in your area.}

Because Bukele incarcerates deportees of foreign nations in CECOT, and because he has linked his credibility as a politician with the idea that no one is allowed to leave CECOT alive, anyone he receives as a deportee of a foreign nation must be someone he has both physical custody and legal custody of—with the latter being essential to him, as without it a foreign court could technically claim power over him and could force him to release prisoners who he does not want to release (for political or other reasons). Obviously, no brutal far-right foreign dictator would ever agree to allow a single U.S. judge to have even a second of legal authority over him. It’s unthinkable.

Perhaps, readers, you now see the problem.

While in theory the second Trump administration might be permitted to ship foreign-born deportees to El Salvador to die in El Salvadoran custody if they’re given due process first—assuming that that due process takes into account whether a lifetime in a cage with under two feet of living space is “cruel and unusual punishment” for the offense the U.S. can prove (or has proven) the inmate in question committed, as otherwise no judge could permit deportation into the circumstances Bukele promises inmates in El Salvador—the same cannot be said of the U.S. citizens Trump wants to house in El Salvador.

Even if President Trump could somehow get around the fact that foreign housing of U.S. citizens is per se illegal, the only way he could get around it would be via some heretofore unthinkable international treaty by which Bukele agrees that the U.S. will retain legal custody of all U.S.-born persons jailed in El Salvador. This means, to be very clear, that a U.S. judge could order any plane carrying such a person to Bukele’s country to turn around at any point; that a U.S. judge could order any U.S. citizen in an El Salvadoran prison to be returned to the U.S. immediately (that is, overnight); and that Nayib Bukele’s U.S.-born CECOT prisoners could appeal the circumstances of their incarceration in CECOT in American courts.

Just from this last point, you can probably detect that this is the sort of thing that Nayib Bukele would never agree to—to the point that no Trump negotiator, whether Rubio or Trump himself or another, would even dare seek such an accommodation. Allowing American prisoners at CECOT access to U.S. courts would quickly expose the truth about CECOT to the world at a time when Bukele is strictly controlling media access to the prison precisely to avoid such revelations. He would never allow prisoners to send petitions to U.S. courts (their texts visible to every U.S. journalist) detailing his secret atrocities.

(3) The second Trump administration is using the foregoing misconceptions to further pretend, falsely, that all violent criminals receive life imprisonment and therefore are eligible for CECOT incarceration.

The far right’s utter lack of understanding of the U.S. criminal justice system is so infamous that it can’t possibly be covered in full here. Suffice to say that almost none of the actual, day-to-day operations of that system are understood or even accepted by Trump, Trump agents, or Trump voters: from the fact that very few cases (of any type) result in any incarceration to the fact that even when incarceration occurs it’s often very brief; from the fact that bona fide life imprisonment is vanishingly rare (meaning that almost all inmates will eventually reintegrate with society) to the fact that arrests that aren’t accompanied by convictions can’t be used to assess someone’s supposed dangerousness now or in the future; from the fact that pretrial detention can’t ever be used as a punishment or deterrent—by law—to the fact that bail is in most U.S. states set exclusively on the basis of how much money is required to ensure a defendant will appear for court in the future, as opposed to a person’s perceived dangerousness; from the fact that most violent crimes are, by volume, minor in nature—bar fights, shoving matches, simple assaults with minimal or no injury—to the fact that some exceedingly violent crimes are committed by juveniles or other persons who, for reasons having to do with the particular circumstances of their life or crime or personality, are likely to be allowed to reintegrate into civil society somewhere down the line.

Most MAGAs don’t even understand the difference between the fact-finding and sentencing phases of a criminal case, meaning that they wrongly believe that every person convicted under a given criminal statute will end up with the same sentence.

They also don’t accept the fact—and it’s manifestly a fact—that many white-collar offenses are far more dangerous to civil society than street crimes are; indeed, many Trump voters have no interest in prosecutors doing much to pursue the most common crimes committed by rich people unless those rich people are also political enemies.

With all this in mind, and keeping in mind that the MAGA Republican Party treats the word “criminal” as do Musk and Bukele—that is, to mean someone who must be locked up forever, provided the criminal isn’t the 34-times-over convicted felon now occupying the Oval Office—we can see how, from the moment Mr. Rubio began his meeting with Mr. Bukele in January 2025, there was a real risk that he would blithely commit U.S. persons to life imprisonment in El Salvador who had no business serving even a year in any prison (or perhaps not even serving any prison time at all).

A Shocking Revelation… Or, In These Times, Perhaps Just a Revelation

Giving the foregoing, perhaps it was a fait accompli that Americans would soon learn that Trump and his administration indeed had no interest in making fine distinctions between any of the categories of persons described above or between any of the three very different types of international agreements itemized supra. It’s not even clear that the administration has the ability to draw such distinctions, given how many of the new top attorneys in the federal executive branch are former Trump personal lawyers not known for their adherence to ethics or even a basic understanding of evidence—from Trump personal lawyer Pam Bondi to Trump personal lawyer Emil Bove, from Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche to Trump personal lawyer Kash Patel, from Trump personal lawyer Alina Habba to former Stop the Steal lawyer Ed Martin, so many of those determining investigative, prosecutorial, and incarceration policies in America are nakedly political Trump agents, not earnest agents of law enforcement.

During the first Trump administration, as many as 70 U.S. citizens were wrongly deported. In the first 75 days of the second Trump administration, the error rate in ICE detentions and deportations appears to have skyrocketed, with deportation or detention scandals that touched U.S. citizens (a child recovering from brain surgery), Canadian tourists (Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney getting held for eleven days), persons on student visas who have committed no offenses (too many cases to name, but see, e.g., here and here and here and here), permanent legal residents (a Columbia graduate deported for peaceful pro-Palestinian activism), asylum-seekers (some who were deliberately deported just before a judge was about to save them), and countless others the Trump administration deems “criminals” on the sole basis that it no longer wants them in the United States. That this latter designation also now applies to many Trump and Musk critics who are most assuredly U.S. citizens should be lost on no one.

But even some seeming “close” cases are, in fact, not that close at all. Among the 300 alleged Venezuelan “terrorists”—Trumpworld slang for members of gangs Trump has falsely declared to be terrorist groups—deported last month were many persons, it turns out, who had no gang affiliations or criminal records at all. This group included gay hairdressers and professional singers, professional soccer players and at least one man who got deported solely due to erroneous ICE copy-pasting between two documents.

Trump’s first deportation of persons into Bukele’s custody was so amateurish that he even sent ten souls Bukele had expressly indicated an unwillingness to take due to their national identity.

Nevertheless, the administration deemed all of these people to be criminals, nearly all of them terrorists, and none of them to be erroneous deportations—even as Trump’s immigration czar Tom Homan refused to identify any specific and explicit basis for deporting any of the 300, and confessed that he had no problem calling even persons without any criminal records “terrorists” (a designation that almost invariably leads to lifetime CECOT imprisonment under the proposed Second Trump-Bukele Accords).

In fact, Homan has made quite clear that he doesn’t care about due process at all, even admitting to being guided by his “gut feelings” on certain matters of criminal justice.

Every Trump official involved with Trump’s deportation scheme has been so adamant in declaring that no deportation mistakes have ever been made by them or anyone in the Trump administration that it has now become clear why this is: because if Trump or anyone in his administration were to admit to sending into the physical and legal custody of Nayib Bukele a person who did not belong in that custody, it would create an international crisis: a situation in which a U.S. court was bound to assert U.S. legal authority over El Salvador’s president in an attempt to compel a dictator to do something.

Not only would Bukele not allow that, but neither would Donald Trump. In a recent Trump administration filing in federal court, Trump officials claimed that Trump can take into account “political damage” to Bukele, and even the possibility that a given U.S. judicial order could “humiliate” Bukele—perhaps by way of revealing atrocities within his regime—in deciding whether to honor a federal judicial ruling. It was a claim almost certainly never made before by any presidential administration: the idea that a U.S. president’s need to please a foreign autocrat could justify violating the United States Constitution is so far beyond the pale as to be instantly nauseating.

Yet the second Trump administration put in writing that it wasn’t going to allow a court to tell it that it had made a deportation mistake if that claim involved a person already in Bukele’s custody, partly to avoid embarrassing Bukele and partly for an even more dire reason discussed below.

A reason that was revealed as soon as something entirely foreseeable happened.

The Abrego Garcia Scandal

CNN sets the scene:

That this deportation was a disaster for Garcia goes without saying; for the rule of law in the U.S., likewise; but it was a particular disaster for the Trump administration not just because a U.S. court was ordering the return of someone in the physical custody of Nayib Bukele—who Bukele also deemed to be in his legal custody—but for a far bigger reason: Abrego Garcia didn’t fall under any of the deals in the second Trump-Bukele Accords.

To wit, Garcia wasn’t a U.S.-born criminal, a foreign-born gang member, or an asylum seeker still awaiting his adjudication—he was caught up in the Second Trump-Bukele Accords entirely by accident. Put another way, while it’s clear that physical custody of Mr. Garcia was transferred to Bukele by accident, legal custody was never transferred at all. Why? Because there is no conceivable basis for the claim that it did (even if we presume, as we shouldn’t, that there’s a legal basis for any transferrals to Bukele in the absence of the Accords’ formalization and given the language of the U.S. Constitution).

So Abrego Garcia belongs in the United States as a matter of law—no matter who has physical custody of him right now.

But this fact alone wouldn’t have caused a scandal, as of course it was imminently in the power of either Donald Trump or Nayib Bukele—or any of their respective agents, e.g. Tom Homan—to acknowledge their mistake and return Mr. Garcia to the United States forthwith.

But if you’ve been following this report from the beginning, and tracking its analyses of not just Trump’s policies but his philosophy, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that what the Trump administration did upon determining it had made one of the very worst mistakes in the history of the U.S. immigration system not to freely admit the error.

After all, it clearly reasoned, was Garcia someone Trump wanted in the United States?

No.

He’s non-white—and therefore, in the usual MAGA calculation, a likely Democrat by inclination—and he’s not a U.S. citizen.

What he is is someone who’s been formally declared by American courts to be a man who would face persecution and possibly death if sent into Nayib Bukele’s arms. In other words, Trump and his agents had every reason to presume that Garcia was a man Bukele wanted to kill—so he’d be exceedingly grateful for Trump deporting him.

But then a strange thing happened.

Someone in Donald Trump’s employ actually did—against all orders—the right thing.

Specifically, a senior DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, admitted to a federal court (as the Rules of Professional Conduct promulgated by the American Bar Association required him to do, at the risk of losing his license to practice law if he didn’t) that Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been deported by the Trump administration. Specifically, Attorney Reuveni said this:

And this:

In sum, Attorney Reuveni admitted that the court would be well within its right to order Nayib Bukele to return a deportee—rather than kill him or imprison him for life, as appears to be the plan Bukele has for most Trump administration deportees—and then he went still further by acknowledging that there was no reason for Garcia to be picked up at all, an admission that had the effect of underscoring (and putting the Trump administration on record as to the premise) that the administration was likely making many such grave errors in its hurry to hustle foreign-born persons out of the country before any federal court could review the deportations.

So what did Trump do to Attorney Reuveni, in response to Attorney Reuveni doing the right thing? A thing Attorney Reuveni was obligated to do by rule of law and his profession’s rules of ethical conduct? He put him on indefinite leave—and accused him of rank insubordination.

But the damage was already done.

Why?

Because by formalizing its unwillingness to accept that any Trump deportation even could be mistaken; by punishing any executive-branch official who admitted such an error; and by refusing to return Abrego Garcia to the United States even though it had admitted he was deported by accident, the second Trump administration had admitted that it couldn’t get Abrego Garcia back because it no longer had legal custody of him.

As CNN reported the second Trump administration told a federal judge in Maryland, “The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia or the nation of El Salvador.” The first part of this sentence reveals a lack of physical custody; the second part confesses, for the first time in U.S. history in a case of this sort, an admitted lack of legal custody.

The Return of the American Slave Trade

As noted above, the STC Deal, the FTO Deal, and the BOP Deal that comprise the still-unsigned Second Trump-Bukele Accords are wildly different from one another as a matter of both fact and law. Even if we accepted that all of them were and are legal—and in fact, none of them are legal—even an executive-branch attorney working to please Donald Trump and indifferent to U.S. rule of law would have realized that an essential piece of the BOP Deal was establishing that Nayib Bukele would never earn legal custody of any person legally resident in the United States.

Why? Because while foreign nations can acquire legal custody of American residents as or when an American resident commits a crime in that nation, it can never occur that an American resident falls into the legal custody of a foreign nation simply due to a clerical error by America.

Such a person, if the foreign nation holding them refused to return them, would be deemed a “hostage.”

Yet Nayib Bukele will not return anyone sent to him, because he would deem that a “humiliation” that causes him “political damage” as a far-right dictator. No dictator can remain a dictator who agrees to be bound by the authority of foreign courts. Thus the GIF response from Bukele himself when he was ordered to return Garcia:

That’s right—Bukele is here expressing humorous disbelief at the notion that any judge in the United States would deign to tell him what to do. Nor is this the first time he’s done so. Bukele’s contempt for American courts is in fact a dominant feature of his disgraceful Twitter feed (along with the boundless self-delusion we’d expect from a sadistic sociopath, with Bukele dubbing himself a “Philosopher King” in his bio).

And because the Trump administration knew it would never regain custody of any person it sent to Bukele unless—for some unknown reason—Bukele himself willed it, it had to cover up the real terms of the Second Trump-Bukele Accords by punishing Reuveni and telling a court in Maryland that it didn’t want Garcia back even though it had no basis for deporting him in the first instance and therefore by all rights should have wanted him back desperately.

Put simply, the position of the Trump administration is as follows:

1. The Second Trump-Bukele Accords make the United States money by saving America the cost of housing asylum-seekers (the STC Deal), imprisoning non-U.S.-born inmates (the FTO Deal), and imprisoning U.S.-born inmates (the BOP Deal).

2. The Second Trump-Bukele Accords also make the United States money by removing from U.S. soil persons the Trump administration—and most notably, Elon Musk—repeatedly insist are draining huge amounts of public resources from U.S. social-welfare programs (even though, yet again, the opposite is actually true: undocumented persons put more money into the U.S. government than they get back, even as they also often do jobs Americans don’t want and get less pay for the same amount of work or more).

3. Anyone the Trump administration transfers to El Salvador is now fully owned by El Salvador—meaning El Salvador has physical and custody of that person.

4. El Salvador retains irrevocable ownership of the bodies the U.S. has sent to it for financial considerations, even if there was no proper legal basis or authority on the front end for what we must candidly now term a “sale.” While obviously the practice of slavery is never acceptable, there are circumstances in which a man or woman who’s received due process can not only be incarcerated but experience thereafter a significant dilution of their rights (e.g., their right to move freely, their right to privacy, and their right to earn a statutory minimum wage for their labor). We’re not discussing such situations here, however.

5. The U.S. has and seeks no visibility into how Bukele disposes of his property. This despite the fact that the Trump administration does know that Bukele plans to kill, either slowly or over years, anyone it sends into his custody as a deportee.

What is described above is the slave trade.

The moment a Trump agent wrote to a federal court in Maryland that “the United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia or the nation of El Salvador,” it was confirming that it had sold Garcia to El Salvador for financial considerations and that the man was now, in every respect, the property of El Salvador—even as the United States, in the form of the second Trump administration, had no basis or justification or excuse or pretext for that sale other than the financial and in-kind “consideration” (contractual value) it derived from its human trafficking with El Salvador’s dictator.

And Now It Gets Worse

If only that were all. But in fact this is only the beginning.

For if the Trump administration deems bought-and-sold a man who isn’t even part of the Second Trump-Bukele Accords, what will be the fate of those U.S. citizens who get caught up in the BOP Deal? These would be Americans currently incarcerated for violent crimes who—we now know—enter into both the physical and legal custody of Nayib Bukele the second Trump and his agents put them on a plane to El Salvador.

In other words, an American serving a sentence of two years in federal prison for, say, defacing the passenger door of a Tesla could be sent to rot in CECOT in under two feet of “living” space…

…and then what? Bukele isn’t subject to any U.S. court, and has made clear that he will never allow himself to be subject to any U.S. court; and the Trump administration has made clear that it will not demand the return of any deportee once they’re deported, even if they’re wrongly in Bukele’s custody; so why would any federal judge—or, for that matter, any American citizen—think that they’ll ever see again an American inmate transferred to CECOT under the planned BOP Deal? In fact, based on the evidence currently before us, a proper and reasonable expectation would be that Trump, Musk, and the rest of the Trump administration will use the Second Trump-Bukele Accords as a back door to lengthen any existing federal criminal sentence to life imprisonment by default.

But wait—it gets worse.

Because while the above-described situation would be horrifying enough even if it only applied to Americans currently incarcerated for life with no possibility of parole—the implication Trump deliberately left when he first vaguely described the Second Trump-Bukele Accords to Americans—because it’s cruel and unusual punishment and incompatible with the American conscience for any inmate to live as CECOT inmates do, that’s not what either Trump or his administration finally intends here. To wit, we know all of the following:

1. The Trump administration has said that it’s going to upgrade many offenses to acts of “domestic terrorism”;

2. the Trump administration has made clear that it will “judge shop” aggressively to get its cases before federal judges who implicitly deem themselves MAGA—and will even move to impeach those federal judges who do not do Trump’s bidding in civil and criminal cases;

3. the Trump administration has made clear, through the Davis Doctrine, that it doesn’t believe itself bound by federal judicial rulings that relate to these four categories: terrorism, foreign policy, international affairs, and immigration;

4. the Trump administration has made clear that its policy for evading judicial-branch oversight in these four areas is to make warrantless arrests in the middle of the night and then immediately transport arrestees over states lines so that their location is unknown to the courts and jurisdiction cannot properly vest in any court (either on an emergency basis or otherwise); and

5. when caught out in all the foregoing, the position of the Trump administration is that as long as it can get an arrestee or deportee (or, really, anyone at all) in the air before a court order attempting to stop them arrives, they can’t be stopped at all (keeping in mind that it’s impossible for a court order to come down in time if no one knows the person in question has been taken by ICE in the first instance).

This is, in short, a recipe for “disappearing” persons en masse as part of the new U.S. slave trade, with that trade’s first—but likely not last—pipeline running to Bukele and El Salvador. Perhaps the next pipeline will run to Israel? Or Saudi Arabia? The UAE? Argentina? Hungary? Indeed, as Trump begins re-negotiating his fake “reciprocal” tariffs with nations across the world in which the Trump Organization has business—from Vietnam to Qatar, Egypt to Brazil—who’s to say that the Second Trump-Bukele Accords don’t become a special program Trump aims to develop with every nation that he deems beholden to him in some way?

A slave trade—bodies for cash—that for the moment has “only” swept up dozens of people, from Garcia to the aforementioned gay Venezuelan hairdresser, from the aforementioned professional soccer player to the aforementioned professional singer—could in months include many hundreds, and within a year or two perhaps thousands.

Under such a scenario, Nayib Bukele and other far-right autocrats (or would-be ones) Trump and Musk are friends with—perhaps Narendra Modi of India? Even Giorgia Meloni of Italy?—would in view of the federal judicial branch be holding American residents, and perhaps even some American citizens, hostage. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk and their political compatriots would blithely insist that only vile “terrorists” and “violent criminals” had been permanently warehoused abroad without the U.S. retaining even legal custody of such persons. In the past (see the Iran Hostage Crisis of the late 1970s), this sort of thing led to U.S. military operations and confrontations abroad, operations that were fortunately fairly quick—commando strikes whose shape and duration were made possible by the number of hostages being comparatively few, the hostages not being securely held, and the U.S. clearly not wanting to get into a war with a nation with the firepower that Iran had at the time and still.

But El Salvador? Holding hundreds of American residents or citizens securely and—in the view of the federal judicial branch—illegally? At some point in the future when, say, a Democratic president is in office (let us pretend for a moment that the 2028 U.S. presidential election occurx as planned) wouldn’t we presume that POTUS needing to find a way, including via military force, to rescue the hostages-cum-slaves Trump sold to his autocratic friends abroad?

All this is madness. Yet it’s clearly where matters now stand, given that, if the second Trump administration had—as it was supposed to—carefully worked out all custodial arrangements and terms with Bukele prior to shipping any human bodies to him, such arrangements and terms would certainly have stated that (a) accidental transfers will be undone as soon as practicable, (b) the United States retains legal custody over all American residents and/or citizens it sends to El Salvador, and (c) all such detentions are reviewable in U.S. courts.

Of course the whole idea would still be wildly illegal—see supra for why, including a listing of the constitutional provisions violated—but at least such contractual clauses would have indicated that maybe the second Trump administration was not interested in developing new slave-trade routes throughout Central America.

But here we are.

And unfortunately, it gets even worse.

The Twist(s)

Before we arrive at the twist in this narrative, we must confirm that there’s no chance any of the possible defenses for what the Trump administration has done can be made:

• Did it secretly sign a formal contract the courts can review for legality? No.

• Did it retain legal custody rights over any deportees? No.

• Has it agreed to work to undo any errors it makes in its deportations? No.

• Has it agreed to acknowledge any ICE errors in the first instance? No.

• Has it agreed to manage affairs going forward so that all its actions are reviewable by the federal judicial branch? No.

• Has it assured the courts that there will be sufficient communication between ICE and DOJ attorneys that the latter can always answer questions about new deportations to the full satisfaction of the federal judiciary? No.

• Has it used its privileged relationship with Nayib Bukele to beg his aid in fixing any and all of its deportation mistakes? No.

• Has it exhibited an interest in defining as narrowly as possible the classes of persons it can send to CECOT for incarceration? No.

• Has it even accepted the authority of federal courts (besides SCOTUS) to issue TROs—Temporary Restraining Orders—against it? No.

• Has it even admitted to the courts, or to the U.S. public, that its negotiations with Bukele constitute merely a handshake deal it could undo at any time? No.

• Has it exhibited a willingness to present to the courts or public the evidence justifying each deportation, as opposed to terming such evidence (if it even exists at all, which it may well not in many cases) the equivalent of “state secrets”? No.

• Has it even admitted that it has the leverage with Bukele to fix mistakes? No.

• Has it explained, given all the foregoing, how a BOP Deal could ever exist—given that no one sent to El Salvador will ever return from there alive? No.

All of this underscores the need to classify the situation at hand as international slave-trading in the conventional sense of that word.

But the twist here is that Americans now have ample evidence that Trump and Musk don’t merely intend for the Second Trump-Bukele Accords to usher in a second era of transnational U.S. slave-trading, but also…

…an era of political detention and exile.

That’s right: Trump and Musk are making clear that they want to re-classify all their political enemies in such a way, and criminalize the conduct of their political enemies in such a way, that it would make American citizens eligible for the new U.S. slave trade on the basis of any number of them engaging in protected, nonviolent, legal activities.

And Trump and Musk are erecting—and in the open, no less—the very transnational system of transport and detention by which anyone they exile from our shores will not only be exiled permanently but will die in a cage… likely in CECOT in El Salvador.

So beyond the fact that the Trump-Musk Axis can’t allow any deported person back in the United States because the tale they would tell of what happened to them in El Salvador would reveal that Trump deportees are being sent not just to bondage but inhumane forms of torture; beyond the fact that the Trump-Musk Axis can’t allow any deported person back to the United States because all such deportees must be securely held by Nayib Bukele permanently (as otherwise, a freed deportee could simply make the trek back to the United States by land and show up at the Southern border again, embarrassing Trump and Bukele by revealing that their paid-for deportation plan was merely another “catch-and-release” operation that merely delayed migrants arriving in the U.S. by a few months); the Trump-Musk Axis also can’t allow deported persons back in the United States because Team Trump’s “once they’re on the plane, federal courts have no jurisdiction” principle—such as it is—will be essential to disappearing political enemies permanently as America slides from a democracy into an autocracy.

So how do we know Trump and Musk are planning on moving toward disappearing their political enemies as part of this new slave trade? Because they have told us so.

Donald Trump and his team—led by co-president Elon Musk—are now engaged in an aggressive nationwide campaign to “define up” both protected speech and actions in the United States as “terrorism” as a means of bringing exponentially more people into the new U.S.-El Salvador slave trade. Attorney General Pam Bondi has made clear that any vandalism (including misdemeanor or felony property crimes that ordinarily, in state courts, would result in no immediate jail sentence for anyone who lacks a prior record, merely a suspended or deferred prison sentence) will instead now be treated as “acts of domestic terrorism” punishable by exactly the sort of decades-long prison terms that would bring a U.S. resident or citizen squarely into this new slave trade.

Yet not only do such crimes not qualify in any respect as terrorism, in order to make such a wholly novel legal claim Trump agents are now identifying Musk’s personal business interests as protected national security interests any harm against which must be deemed “terrorism.” Moreover, these agents are juxtaposing Musk’s personal business interests with the political beliefs of Trump voters to a degree that miscategorizes a mere hatred of Musk or Tesla as an attempt to violently intimidate 80 million Trump voters through political violence. This idiosyncratic claim has no basis in fact or law, either.

But it’s not merely Bondi’s appearances on Fox News that we can look to for evidence of this new policy, nor even the several investigations and prosecutions (as “terrorism”) mere Tesla vandals now face in federal criminal courts. Many Americans don’t know that, on April 20, an executive order that Donald Trump signed on Inauguration Day will spring: an order that mandates that new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—two of Trump’s most ardent sycophants—make a recommendation to the president on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 over, in particular, all matters relating to immigration and terrorism (the latter under a bizarre and counterfactual claim that illegal immigration constitutes an “invasion” by “foreign terrorists”).

While this report is not a primer on the Insurrection Act, suffice to say that it has almost never been invoked by a U.S. president outside of wartime; that outside of wartime it has only been applied in the most localized and time-limited ways one could imagine (such as the desegregation of schools in Arkansas by GOP President Dwight Eisenhower at a time potential imminent mass violence accompanied such efforts); that it gives an American president powers consistent with what we know as “martial law”; and that absolutely nothing happening in the United States qualifies as an invasion, a terrorist invasion, or even terrorism at all, such that an invocation of the Act by President Trump this month or this year would be even distantly appropriate.

Yet the terms of Trump’s new slave trade, which is specifically and repeatedly linked to presidential powers concerning immigration and terrorism by Attorney General Pam Bondi and her subordinates at the Department of Justice, are such that if indeed Trump invokes the Insurrection Act (which Hegseth and Gabbard are sure to have been told in advance to recommend he do), it will immediately take what Trump and Bukele are up to to a new level—one well beyond even the systematized sadism and lawlessness this report has already detailed.

In short, a martial law-empowered Donald Trump would be able to make the case to a SCOTUS he largely handpicked that no one can stop him from sending human bodies overseas permanently if he determines they are involved in terrorism or immigration violations; no one can stop him from falsely identifying certain U.S. citizens who are critics of him or Elon Musk or MAGAism generally as terrorists; and even if the Court disagrees with him on any of this the Act gives him the power and (as he’d surely insist) the responsibility to ignore them.

With all this in mind, the new international American slave trade could be effectively “legalized” in the next few weeks or months.

{Note: Keep in mind that even if Trump allows leftist protesters, and/or those who damage his or Musk’s property, to stay in the civilian criminal justice system, Pam Bondi can still pursue charges, theories of these cases, and punishments in these cases that lead to such long prison sentences that these defendants are fed instantly into the meat grinder of Donald Trump’s vile new slave-trade pipeline—specifically, under the BOP Deal that he hasn’t yet fully executed.}

Readers still seeking signs of optimism might now say, “Okay, but surely this is all speculation? Surely there’s no actual indication that Trump and Musk want to arrest U.S. citizens simply for espousing supposedly unpalatable ideas? Surely it’s exclusively proven crimes that they’re looking at?” Alas, no. Consider this recent Elon Musk tweet:

The tweet above is so historically astounding that it needs to be broken down carefully.

Note that in a single post the user Musk is agreeing with and amplifying—and this is, to be clear, one of Elon Musk’s favorite accounts to retweet and amplify—goes from calling peaceful anti-Tesla events “protests” to calling them an “uprising” to calling them “TERROR.”

Again, this rhetorical slippage occurs in just one tweet.

No attempt whatsoever is made, in this tweet agreed with and amplified by Musk, to distinguish between (a) a protest; (b) an event—like, say, the Trump-incited January 6 attack—that could be deemed an illicit, possibly violent mass political “uprising”; and (c) a discrete act of terrorism that can be prosecuted not just as a series of assaults or acts of vandalism (as January 6 mostly was) but a felony resulting in life imprisonment.

Moreover, this tweet makes no distinction between those who commit an act (be it peaceful protest, a January 6-style event, or an act of domestic terrorism) and those who use their First Amendment rights to indirectly fund a person who then ends up engaging in such an act. Why does this matter? Because funding a peaceful protest is wholly legal, and even funding a day of events that turns into an uprising like January 6 is, if recent history is precedent, not illegal, as while Trump megadonor Julie Fancelli—who provided much of the money for the D.C. events held on January 6, 2021—did plead the Fifth Amendment before the House January 6 Committee, she was never charged with crimes by the Trump administration’s or Biden administration’s DOJ.

Indeed, even providing funding for a terror attack could end up being something other than illegal if there’s no evidence the funder knew or should’ve known that the funds donated would be used for that purpose. Yet here we have Musk and a pal referring to the funding of peaceful “protests” as a criminal act of “terror.” It manifestly is not.

But wait—the tweet gets worse. Because in fact there’s not even any evidence that the group in question “funded” these particular protests at all, let alone that the funding caused or incited any specific act, let alone that the protests at issue here involved any crimes, let alone that even if they had involved crimes and had been funded by a group in a way that did directly cause a crime that those crimes could therefore be assessed to be the “foreseeable” result of such funding.

Despite all this, Musk and his associate go directly to the opposite end of the spectrum, legally speaking, presuming—without evidence—that the sort of event that arguably occurred here is in fact the only sort of “event funding” one would ever expect to result in a prosecution: a terror attack that was funded by a discrete entity that knew that that attack was going to take place and be the direct result of its donations.

Their harrowing leaps in logic notwithstanding, the two Twitter users don’t merely imagine the need for an investigation of what’s going on with Tesla protests, but rather take comfort in one of them, Musk—who’s been co-president for three months now—promising that those involved in left-leaning nonprofit groups “will” be “held legally accountable” for protests against his companies, meaning that these persons will be incarcerated.

More than this, Musk makes his promise in response to a comment describing such actions as “TERROR”—meaning that what he’s actually promising is that Democratic activists who exert their First Amendment rights will be imprisoned for terrorism (AG Bondi having confirmed that any crimes whose victim is Tesla will be treated by the DOJ as domestic terrorism). And do you know who the biggest public cheerleader for Donald Trump’s plan to imprison American “terrorists” in El Salvador is? Elon Musk.

Do you know who the biggest public cheerleader is for Nayib Bukele’s theory that one needs to find potential troublemakers before they commit crimes and lock them up for the rest of their lives? If you guessed Elon Musk, you’re right again.

Do you know who’s doing more to fund the GOP—at all levels, in all contests—than any single individual has in the history of American politics, indeed by a factor of ten, such that beyond spending most days talking with Donald Trump face-to-face he has more sway over what the entire Republican Party will do (and accept) going forward than any U.S. political donor who’s ever lived? Yet again we’re speaking of Elon Musk.

In other words, Musk has made clear what he wants, and he has purchased—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—the political influence required to get what he wants.

And what he wants, by his own admission, is the felony arrest of anyone who has ever been involving in funding—remembering here that under the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling the spending of money by institutions for political purposes is “free speech”—any group that’s later connected to any conduct he deems to have had an effect on his finances. And if he ever doubted, even for a moment, that this goal is within his reach, Bondi has reassured him by going on television near-nightly (and even issuing DOJ press releases) to breathlessly describe the conduct Musk is decrying as “terrorism.”

This is, in short, an end-around on the First Amendment that can instantly turn any progressive donor into a potential future slave in a Central American gulag run by a close friend of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Conclusion

So what’s the goal here? Well, the worst-case scenario is that Trump and Musk are laying the groundwork for selling their political enemies into slavery. But even the best-case scenario is that they plan to so scare their political opponents’ donors that money for Musk and Trump opponents dries up entirely during the 2026 midterms and the regrettably still entirely hypothetical 2028 U.S. presidential election.

Proof ends this report with perhaps the most shocking revelation of all—which is sure saying something, given that this is a report that indicates that Donald Trump is now overseeing a massive transnational Human Trafficking ring.

So what’s the shocking thing?

That this isn’t the first time Donald Trump has been accused of Human Trafficking.

Those are words we couldn’t even imagine saying of any other U.S. politician, but here we are, looking at the many years Trump spent atop Trump Models—years outlined in detail in the Proof Series book from 2024, Proof of Cruelty—and seeing in those years evidence that Donald Trump is extremely willing to orchestrate the movement of human bodies across national borders in a state akin to slavery.

So if you’re wondering if we have any evidence that Donald Trump is already inclined toward precisely the unimaginable crimes described in this Proof report, yes—we do.

Which leaves us only to review the uncontested facts on the ground, which confirm that what Trump is doing is indeed slaving, and the President of the United States is indeed, therefore, a willing slaver. The proof for this resides in hard facts no one can contest, because they’re both public and manifestly not the subject of any dispute:

(1) Donald Trump asserts the right to seize certain people off the street and take physical custody of them without due process.

(2) He asserts this right even with respect to certain people in the U.S. legally.

(3) He asserts the right to send these seized persons abroad, to the custody and the jurisdiction of a foreign slaver known to treat his slaves—people he cages without them having committed any offenses—beyond inhumanely.

(4) He asserts the right to send these seized persons abroad without any right of return, or even with an ability on the part the United States—either the judicial branch or the executive branch thereof—to undo such permanent transactions.

(5) He says, openly—indeed, he boasts of it—that this process profits the United States both materially and non-materially, meaning that he admits he is engaged in a money-making scheme.

(6) He’s now confirmed, via the Abrego Garcia Scandal, that this process is absolute, meaning that it doesn’t merely apply to certain categories of persons—i.e., meaning that it can be undone if it is applied wrongly to a person—but by definition applies to any person to whom it’s applied. (On its face this seems a tautology, but it simply means the sale of all persons by Trump to Bukele is final, and that there’s no room in the contract of sale for any buyer’s remorse, no matter how urgent and/or warranted.)

(7) He seeks to imminently expand his trafficking of humans across national borders via the awesome powers invested in him by any invocation of the Insurrection Act.

This is slavery.

This is slavery by any definition.

So a mere 75 days into his presidency, Donald Trump has recreated the transnational U.S. slave trade with a foreign far-right dictator who’s a personal friend of his—and also a friend of his co-president, Elon Musk—via which slave trade any person can be exiled into permanent slavery in El Salvador without any chance of them returning to America or freedom unless their owner, Nayib Bukele, wills that it should happen.

Which of course he won’t—unless he’s been told backchannel by Trump (or a Trump agent) that they dearly will it, which they most certainly won’t if the exiled now-slave is a political enemy of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or a person who’s in favor with either.

God help us.

Coda

Published—respectively—on CNN and Twitter shortly after this report was released:

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Introduction

The New York Times reports that the European Union remains uncertain of whether Donald Trump is indifferent to or contemptuous of it. But there’s candidly no reason for such doubt—Trump’s contempt for Europe is at least as old as his fondness for the Soviet Union and then Russia, and it stretches back at least forty years, likely more.

As President of the United States, Trump wants the European Union and NATO to be either neutered or destroyed—goals he shares with Russian president Vladimir Putin—and there’s so little fuzz on this that it should no longer be a topic of speculation in Brussels (the European capital where both the EU and NATO are headquartered).

The Trump Trip to Moscow That Got Us Here

Prior to 1987, Donald Trump had no meaningful investment in U.S. politics. He was a moderately successful businessman who had made his bag via the sponsorship of his father, who decided to name Donald the heir to his real estate empire despite his not being his eldest son (Fred Jr. wanted to be a pilot, and died in 1981). While Fred Sr.’s death in 1999 would bring to Donald Trump the second pillar of his future wealth—a minimum $413 million inheritance Trump would forever after lie about (much like Elon Musk has consistently lied about his own rich father’s largesse in setting him on the path to even greater riches)—in 1987 it was Fred Sr.’s life that all of Trump’s wealth dependent upon.

Therefore, more specifically, Trump’s wealth depended on the philosophy Fred Sr. had taught little Donny from the time he was a boy, a philosophy that remains the biggest determinant of every decision that the now-nearly-octogenarian Donald Trump makes:

“You have to be a killer if you want to be a king.” — Fred Trump

Those who aren’t Trump biographers may scoff at the idea that the words of a father can so direct the life of a son, so it’s important to understand that Donald Trump was not a mere son the way other men are: Trump, as heir to a massive real estate empire and the fortune that came with it, was (a) a subject of his at once kingly, domineering, and bigoted father; (b) dependent on his father from an early age for the things that he valued most (namely money, fame, and influence); (c) bereft of any counterbalancing maternal figure (as Trump’s mother largely ignored him); (d) bereft of many counter-balancing relationships at all (as he wasn’t that close with the rest of his family, with the possible exception of now-deceased brother Robert Trump; he was also incapable of forming lasting intimate bonds with women); and (e) took his father’s Killer Theory to heart so completely—perhaps not surprising, given that he spent almost every day in contact with his father—that he applied it to every aspect of his life.

Proof writes “every aspect” advisedly, here. Trump employed Killer Theory not just in business dealings but in legal ones and even in personal relationships. To Trump in 1987, not only was every dealing with another person or institution in point of fact a zero-sum war-game—even all intimate relationships—but whether one “won” those engagements, and perhaps even whether one did so with some measure of brutality, determined one’s value as a human being (or more specifically as a man; women simply didn’t rate in Trump’s view, maybe because he grew up without a present and engaged maternal figure).

That was who businessman Donald Trump was in 1987, when—every source agrees—the KGB arranged for him to travel to Moscow as part of (unbeknownst to Trump at the time) a now-infamous KGB recruitment drive focused on American businessmen.

The KGB Recruitment of Donald Trump

What the then forty-year-old Trump could not have known at the time, so in thrall did he remain to his imperial pater familias, is that Killer Theory made him a perfect target for the KGB.

All KGB agents had to do was tell Trump that he had, in effect, been a very good boy: he was indeed a “killer,” a real man, and so much so that someone besides his dad and a succession of women whose love he couldn’t keep had finally decided to take notice of this fact and finally treat him as the alpha male he (surely) had always been. And why did Trump need such flattering? Because his dad was still alive, indeed still vigorous, in 1987, despite the fact that Donald had taken over the Trump Organization in 1971.

As long as Fred Sr. was alive, Donald Trump was still “little Donny” on some psychic level. Apart from, as noted, a succession of women who treated Trump as a ravishing playboy but whose opinions didn’t finally rate for him because they were women, it took the entire Soviet Union to treat Trump as the man his dad had ordered him to be.

And 1987 was the perfect year for such an intervention to arrive.

Why? Because what Donald Trump learned about himself throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, as he ran the Trump Organization into the ground, was that he actually had failed at the three things his life had been self-admittedly constructed around: being as great a businessman as his father had been (he was manifestly not); being a “killer” as his father had commanded (which he couldn’t be, of course, if he weren’t a great businessman, and, again, he wasn’t a great businessman); and finding a woman who would actually love him, as his mother didn’t appear to.

Trump’s first of six quick-succession bankruptcies would arrive in 1991, but by July 1987—when he traveled to Moscow at the clandestine arrangement of the KGB—he may not have been fully aware of its sponsorship of the opportunity, but he surely was aware that the Trump Organization was collapsing under his years of mismanagement.

His knew his dad was going to watch him fail. The world was going to watch him fail.

His father was going to see that his son wasn’t “a killer.” The world would see it, too.

It’s against this fraught backdrop that three former top-level KGB agents, speaking at different times and in different places, long after the fall of the KGB, have confirmed that the KGB recruited Trump while he was, at its arrangement, in Moscow in 1987:

1. Alnur Mussayev, a former KGB officer who later became the head of intelligence for the nation of Kazakhstan and says Trump was recruited under the KGB code name “Krasnov,” meaning “beauty” (note that The Daily Beast link here takes ten seconds to fully load, and note also that the KGB assigning Trump an operational title does not mean that Mr. Trump accepted it or was even aware he’d received it);

2. Yuri Shvets, a former Major in the KGB who now lives in America and has no reason to fear Putin, and who served as one of the many sources for revered U.S. historian Craig Unger’s bestselling books about Donald Trump; and

3. Sergei Zhyrnov, a former KGB officer who has “endorsed” the claim that Trump was recruited by the KGB, noting (as The Hill summarizes) that in Moscow in 1987 “Trump would’ve been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room; his every move would have been recorded and documented, [so] he could have been either caught in a ‘honey trap’ (“All foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB—100% [of them],” Zhyrnov told a journalist recently) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.”

To be clear, there are at least three “problems” with the above, tripled-sourced claim:

1. No one believes former KGB agents—even those who, like the three men above, are no longer associated with Russian intelligence, and and even though U.S. and European historians have made fruitful use for decades of revelations by former-KGB whistleblowers (this despite the conventional wisdom that there is no such thing as a “former” spy);

2. there’s a mountain of further corroborating evidence of Trump’s recruitment, but since no more of it than what is listed above is testimonial (at least testimonial in the first-hand sense), anyone looking to deny Trump’s involvement with Russian intelligence can pretend that only three sources allege it (Proof is referring here to everything from the BBC and CIA confirmation that the Kremlin has “more than one [Trump] tape, audio and video, from more than one date, in more than one place [in Russia], of a sexual nature” to precise knowledge of the man who was with Trump when that material was allegedly collected, a Trump associate and playboy who has since settled down in Russia and not returned to the United States, and who works for a key coordinator of Russian election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Kremlin agent and 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort boss Oleg Deripaska); and

3. no one in the general public seems to really understand what “recruitment by the KGB” actually means, as many wrongly assume it must mean that Trump is an active witting Russian intelligence agent when in fact it could simply mean that Trump is an unwitting and only intermittently used Russian asset—two wildly divergent possibilities that leave ample room for Trump supporters acting in bad faith to paint anyone who references Trump’s seemingly inarguable recruitment by Soviet intelligence in the 1980s to be a conspiracy theorist and leftist fanatic.

But the good news in all this is that we don’t have to go down these long rabbit holes.

There’s more than enough that’s known and uncontested for us to be getting on with.

The 1987 Conversion of Donald Trump

What no one disagrees on is the fact that Russia was still the Soviet Union in 1987.

It was an authoritarian state of the sort we now know Trump admires.

It was a Communist state.

Vladimir Putin was not yet in power.

It was also an enemy of the United States in every conceivable sense, and remained so until the Fall of Communism began two years later, in July 1989. Trump may have had an inkling of that coming collapse in 1987 and seen it as a promising development in the view of the Trump Organization—there’s no evidence Trump ever much cared about the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States or to global security—but that would be speculation. What’s not speculation is that Trump was profoundly enamored with the Soviet Union from the moment he stepped into it, seeing the authoritarian grip in which the Communist Party held its victims as fertile soil for the sort of graft-forward business operations Trump has always deemed himself expert in, to the point that there’s an entire body of literature (that Proof has delved into and cited at length, so will not regurgitate here) relating to Trump’s philosophy that businessmen should be able to bribe governments.

He’s said this openly. Heck, he’s even stopped enforcement of Bribery statutes.

So it’s wrong to say Trump’s love of Russia began with Putin—or began with Russia.

It began with his love of the Soviet Union as an authoritarian state that he could bribe.

More specifically, it began with Trump’s identification of the Soviet Union as a Killer State—a nation-state that acted, in 1987, the same way Fred Trump Sr. had taught his son to act: without regard for laws or norms, and purely on the basis of demonstrated might. Whereas, in Trump’s view, leading democratic states in the 1980s, including the United States, were Loser States (broadly speaking, states that allow themselves and their citizens to be taken advantage of by nation-states that don’t and won’t play by any rules), the Soviet Union embraced bribery as a means of doing business because it was a Killer State well understood the mantra of all evil persons and institutions in human history: the ends always justify the means. Did Trump mind that that was also the ethos of Communism, indeed the very reason the Soviet Union was the archetypal Communist state? It did not.

“Killer” or “loser”—“king” or “victim”—those were the two options Fred Sr. taught his son to see. Any vacillating between those options was a sign of terminal weakness.

The Newspaper Ad That Changed Everything

We don’t know exactly what happened when Trump spent days and days and days in Moscow surrounded by KGB agents who specifically wanted to recruit him to become a politician in the United States.

We only know that when Trump returned from a Killer State (the Communist Soviet Union) to the very Loser State (the democratic United States) that had given him and his family everything they ever had, he immediately became political and in a way that many regarded as bizarrely anti-American.

Nor did this happen slowly, or gradually, or over years and years. It was immediate.

One of the very first things Trump did upon returning to the States was something he never did unless it was mission-critical to him: spend a lot of money on something.

Specifically, in the August after his July trip he spent $94,801 in 1987 dollars (that is, over a quarter of a million dollars in 2025 terms—specifically, $263,248) to place a single ad in just three newspapers: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.

The ad, addressed to “the American people,” was the most nakedly political act the forty-year-old Trump had ever undertaken in his entire life, and there’d been no sign whatsoever it was coming before he went to the Soviet Union to be wined and dined by the KGB.

Here’s the ad:

The subject of the ad, readers will notice, was advocating for the number-one foreign policy goal of the Communist Soviet Union: getting America to end the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan was America’s post-World War II foreign policy agenda. It deeply invested America in the well-being of Europe and Japan in part as a way to stave off Soviet geopolitical advances and a recurrence of the German-Italian-Japanese Axis.

But as a man more familiar with Killer Theory than actual geopolitics, Trump offered up in his bizarre ad a minimally erudite case for unwinding the Marshall Plan. Rather, he identified Japan, along with unnamed European and Middle Eastern nation-states, as Loser States that were taking advantage of America and, in so doing, preventing it and its citizens from becoming the “killers” they were born to be. Thus (emphasis in original):

For decades [since the Marshall Plan launched after WWII], Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States. The saga continues unabated as [America] defends the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States….why are these nations [America’s allies under the Marshall Plan] not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

….

The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.

….

Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to their countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours. Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others [including Europe] pay for the protection we extend as allies.

This is all so telling that one hardly knows where to begin. But what it clearly adds up to is exactly the same Trump Doctrine we see today. True, it’s not a “doctrine” in the sense of being intelligent, well-considered, workable, or even ethical, but it’s coherent.

The Trump Doctrine

As articulated in his first major political announcement, the Trump Doctrine is this:

(1) One of the major things a nation must seek to avoid is being “laughed at.” This notion may at first blush seem almost preternaturally puerile and even “high school-ish”… because it is. But if you want to distinguish between the Killer States and Loser States and you’re a forty-year-old Donald Trump with a very limited understanding of geopolitics, and if you also have the emotional maturity of a teenager, you put the matter in such stark terms as this: Killer States laugh at other nation-states as they abuse and/or control them, while Loser States get laughed at as they are controlled and/or abused by Killer States.

By this measure, Trump repeatedly identifies the United States, in his September 1987 ad, as a Loser State. His own successes there—made possible by the very nation he’s exhibiting contempt for—are simply taken for granted, as his focus has already moved to consideration of how he believes America writ large is seen in the world, not how it uniquely made the successes of the Trump Family possible.

But here’s the catch—as Trump frames it, it’s really not a matter of how America is seen by the entire world, is it?

That is, there’s never been any evidence whatsoever that America’s allies are “laughing at us.” Indeed, merely stating that without any evidence suggests a deep discomfort with our allies on Trump’s part, a presumption that they must be hiding something and actually have America’s demise in view. In Trumpist terms, either they’re Killer States in disguise—abusing America ceaselessly—or they’re all fellow Loser States that America has no business allowing itself to be abused by. At base, in implying that America’s allies are and have always been “laughing at” it, Trump would be exhibiting a deep mistrust of our friends that we’d have to deem borderline pathological. We might even argue—and probably should—that Trump is here militating against there ever being trust between nation-states per se.

But if Trump has no actual evidence America’s allies are laughing at us, what exactly is he talking about here?

Well, he appears to be speaking, instead, about the enemies of America—for instance, the very people who were wining and dining him all about Moscow as he conceived, apparently, of this jeremiad against America’s foreign policy in the 1980s. No doubt the KGB, aware that Communism was on its last legs, projected strength to Trump during his visit, and did it in part by playing on his core emotional immaturities and particularly his vanity: a fear of being laughed at that was graver and more imminent, than anything else in view. That Trump would have been able to see, by 1989, that he’d been played in 1987, and that the real joke had been on the KGB and the Soviet Union, and that the winner of the Cold War was actually America, goes without saying. But Trump appears to have been oddly insensate to that victory, perhaps in part because it wasn’t his. It was Ronald Reagan’s, it was George H.W. Bush’s, and it was attributable to a Republican establishment he wasn’t part of—an establishment he’d spend the next twenty years privately seething at until he ran for office in 2016 and made sure all America understood how much he hated it (especially the blue-blood Bush Family).

So Trump’s point, in his 1987 ad, was actually that the United States should care what its enemies think of it.

Which is another way of saying we should act as our enemies would… to impress them.

Which is another way of saying America’s allies are holding America back from matching the “killer” instincts and readily demonstrated powers of its enemies.

So all of that is… crazy? America needs to be wary of its enemies, but certainly need not seek to impress them. America defeats its enemies by not being like them, in fact.

Our allies are why and how we defeat our enemies, not a hindrance to that ambition.

Indeed, Trump’s constructions are so counter-intuitive and borderline nonsensical—certainly they take no part in any American intellectual tradition—that the simplest solve for the question of where they hail from is to guess they’re of foreign extraction.

Are they from Russia? Who knows. But we know they echo Soviet (and then Russian) thinking precisely, and were partly formed while Trump was in Russia trying to seal the most lucrative business deals of his life with Kremlin agents—something he was still trying to do in signing three separate deals for a Trump Tower Moscow between 2013 and 2016, a period during which he knew he would be running for POTUS (see the New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion, Simon & Schuster, 2018).

(2) Lies about how much money allies owe America can be used to make it impossible for us to ally with anyone. In falsely saying, in the late 1980s, that America’s allies owed it “hundreds of billions of dollars”—which would be the equivalent of well over a trillion dollars in 2025—you could be forgiven for hearing an echo of what Donald Trump just told our European ally Ukraine at a time when we have given it about $100 billion in aid over the last decade: that the figure is actually $350 billion and that Ukraine now must pay us $500 billion, in consequence of that. Huh? How does demanding five times what we’ve given Ukraine make any sense? For that matter, how would even demanding $100 billion make sense? A $100 billion bill would suggest the United States got no benefit from all the work Ukraine has done to forestall an even larger Russian invasion of Europe, one that would quite possibly incite World War III.

In other words, in asking for $500 billion Trump is (a) lying about U.S. foreign aid, (b) pretending that there’s no value at all to the U.S. in any foreign spending it makes, and (c) demanding between 600% and 700% of what America could credibly say it’s owed if we assume all diplomatic relationships are purely mercantile rather than values-based.

In other words, Trump is setting an amount he knows that Ukraine can’t possibly pay.

So what Trump was doing in 1987 he is still doing today: (a) lying about how much aid the U.S. gives other nations; (b) lying about whether that aid advantages the U.S. at all; (c) setting a “payback” amount that he knows our allies cannot meet, which then gives him the excuse he’s clearly looking for to abandon them altogether.

(3) America has no identifiable interests abroad. Throughout his 1987 declaration, we find Trump at pains to—and preposterously, it must be said—frame America as a self-sufficient nation-state that needs no one else.

Perhaps you’re wondering where that idea comes from? Once again, Fred Trump Sr.

A “killer” is self-sufficient, of course; he needs no one else to survive, nor even to thrive, which is how you know someone is a killer and a king rather than a loser.

The problem of course, is that besides being wrong on a human level, the late Fred Sr.’s ideas are positively deranged as a matter of foreign policy. No nation-state can go it alone—not in this century nor the last one, at least. To say that America needs no oil, benefits nothing from helping protect its allies, has no interests to safeguard in Japan or Europe or the Middle East, is to so juxtapose the sort of man Trump wants to be with the sort of nation America (or any nation) is that it’s… well, simply delusional.

Or to a point, at least.

There did used to be nations that, for long stretches, made claims of self-sufficiency.

Yes, these nations did business with other nations, but if another nation-state had something they desperately needed they simply invaded, overran, and occupied it.

Such nations were called empires.

Most of human history has been defined by empires rather than mere nation-states, so in this sense there’s actually some history—albeit a very dark history—lying behind Trump’s way of thinking. That way of thinking also happens to have been the Soviet Union’s way of thinking after World War II (see, e.g., its dangerous and morally vile involvements in Korea, Vietnam, China, Afghanistan, nations in Africa and South America, et al.), and which also happens to be the way of Vladimir Putin’s thinking in this century.

Just as Donald Trump wants Greenland, and Canada, and Mexico, and Panama, and (lest we forget his long-held invasion plans) Venezuela, Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine.

Both men want to be emperors. Both men think in terms of empire.

Both men want to pretend that the two world wars didn’t happen, that therefore we learned nothing from them, that therefore we can just return to the Age of Empires.

What’s bizarre about that is that we know why Russia wants to ignore the world wars: because by the end of the 1980s it had lost its former republics, most of its wealth, and indeed had continued geopolitical influence only for the worst reason imaginable—an aging nuclear arsenal it could use to destroy the entire planet at will. That excepted, it was just, as late U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) once famously said, “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

But America? America helped win not just one but both world wars, and prospered in their aftermath(s). Why would any American want to abandon the Marshall Plan? Why would any American want to try to go it alone, become an empire, and see no Allied Powers foreign interests as meaningful or shared?

Here again we must return to Fred Trump Sr. It’s not that Trump had any geopolitical sensibilities in the 1980s; he simply had a nose for weakness and an eye for dominance and correctly sussed out that—while by no means sustainable or ethical—empires can for a time exhibit much more of the latter and far less of the former than democracies.

In Trump’s view, echoing Killer Theory, that makes empires better than democracies.

(4) There are Killer States and Loser States, and the Killer States must divide the world among themselves while turning the Loser States into vassal states. If the vision of geopolitics Trump shares with all fascist governments now extant and all Communist governments now extant is that it’s better that there be a small number of empires (Killer States) and a large number of vassal states (Loser States), it follows that no Killer State can ever be subservient to any other Killer State and that therefore the Killer States must carve up regions of influence in the way Spain and Portugal did in 1494.

The implications of this are terrifying—especially if you understand which nations Trump has identified as Killer States because they either have autocratic governments or could have them (as is the case with the United States, under his current leadership):

• North American Killer State: the United States

• South American Killer State: Brazil

• Middle East Killer State: Saudi Arabia/UAE

• Oceania Killer State: China

• Southeast Asian Killer State: India

Notice anything important missing? Well, several things are missing here, of course.

First, Trump sees all of Europe as Loser States, with the exception of a small number of potential vassal states that are Loser States attached to (or that could be attached to) a Killer State. Hungary is effectively a vassal state of Russia; Belarus is undoubtedly a vassal state of Russia; Ukraine is an incipient Russian vassal state, in that Trump believes it can and will fall to Russia without American foreign aid; and then there are a series of likely near-term Russian vassal states (at least in Trump’s view of how the next twenty years could unfold in Europe): Moldova, Georgia, Montenegro, and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Europe also has several Kremlin client states or potential client states, including Italy, Greece, and Turkey (a small portion of the last of these is in Europe); these states still have self-respect, in Trump’s view, but they’re also smart enough to aid the Russians as and when they can in recognition of Russia’s presumptive status as a Killer State.

When you consider that Russia is itself considered a European country—in part—and that Switzerland is perpetually neutral, and that several of the 44 countries in Europe are so small and/or poor as to be beneath Trump’s notice (e.g., Monaco, San Marino, The Vatican, Malta, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Andorra, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia) and several others have far-right parties Trump and his co-president Elon Musk believe can soon take over (in Germany, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, and France), you can understand the terrifying reality: Trump believes that Russia may well be the premiere Killer State left in Europe, and he’s fine with that because he sees the EU, as he has said repeatedly, as the enemy of the United States and therefore will rejoice if it collapses.

So the premise that scares Europe to no end—that Putin wants all his Soviet republics back, including the Baltics (and no one doubts this) and wants several other nations he believes he can infiltrate in the near-term (e.g., Montenegro)—is of no concern at all to Trump because he sees it as inevitable that America’s one-time European allies will fail due to (a) their limited defense spending, (b) their lack of nuclear weapons (in most but of course not all cases), (c) their openness to immigration, and (d) their self-avowed “social democratic” political philosophical bent. He doesn’t see the point in the U.S. saving these Loser States from being overrun by Russia, a Killer State, because, as he likes to point out, there is a “big, beautiful ocean” between Europe and America and therefore we don’t share (to borrow from his 1987 declaration, here) “their” interests.

Trump deems America’s sole sphere, at present, to be North America. And his claims about what he wants to do during his second term manifest this. Do we have evidence he wants to annex Canada? Yes. Do we have evidence he wants to annex Greenland? Yes. Do we have evidence he wants to start firing missiles into Mexico, which would put America on a collision-course with that nation in terms of a military engagement and could well end in an American “victory” that allows for a partial annexation? Yes.

Has Trump mused about using a blockade to control Cuba? Yes. Has he dismissed the other Caribbean nations as “shitholes” not worth America’s time or interest? Yes.

In South America, Trump spent years trying to forge a relationship with the man he believed would use a coup to take permanent tyrannical control of Brazil—the villain Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Eduardo still appears at every CPAC for a speech and was meeting with Trump agents just before the January 6 insurrection—but also mulled plans to invade, as noted above, the only other nation on that continent that could be a realistic counterbalance to American power, Venezuela (which has oil and close ties to Russia). He’s already developed close ties to the current chief Killer State in Central America, El Salvador, via its far-right dictator Nayib Bukele—yes, the same one Elon Musk openly adores and amplifies near-daily—and the remaining South American Killer State aspirant now that Brazil and Venezuela appear to be in lasting political chaos: Argentina, led by an obviously disturbed far-right demagogue in Javier Milei.

The point here is that Trump has plans to (a) abandon Europe and Oceania, (b) lock down power in North America, and (c) forge close ties to potential Killer States in South America that could in time be transformed into American vassal states. The Trump Doctrine sees no value in America seeking to maintain influence in Europe, no value in seeking to maintain influence in Asia, and focuses, rather, on the creation of a North American empire that can expand northward (into The Arctic, which Trump correctly deems the next major global military theater due to the natural resources to be found there as climate change alters it landmasses—something Trump wants rather than fears, hence his lack of interest in tackling climate change) and southward (via a takeover of or a firm influence with Brazil, Venezuela, El Salvador, and/or Argentina).

The Trump Doctrine is KGB—and Now FSB—Nirvana

For years Americans have struggled to understand why Trump favors intelligence that comes from the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB, rather than U.S. intelligence.

One simple answer is that Trump doesn’t share the goals of U.S. intelligence. Rather, he shares the geopolitical vision of the Kremlin and the FSB. To be clear, this in no way necessitates him being a Kremlin agent; he may simply, because of his father or because he believes he can get richer in an Age of Empires than he can in an Age of Democracies, “earnestly” want the future of Earth to look different than—say—those who love America’s democracy do.

Indeed, if you look at the components of the Trump Doctrine as itemized above, you realize that all I’ve written about it could just as easily be said of what the Kremlin now wants, and therefore the Trump Doctrine of 1987 could have just as easily been written by the head of the KGB and the Trump Doctrine of 2025—which is identical to the Trump Doctrine of 1987—could have just as easily been written by the head of the FSB. It doesn’t matter if the KGB directly, indirectly, aggressively, or passively convinced Trump in 1987 (or at any time since, via the FSB) that its view of the world was preferable, and it doesn’t matter if Trump came around to its view because of his familial philosophy or his venality or his vanity or a belief that only in an autocracy can a man like him rise to power, or any combination of the foregoing. The upshot is, he did come around. His views are those of the Kremlin, and unabashedly so.

Not just the Kremlin of 1987, either. The Kremlin right now, this very day, in 2025.

Trump’s 1987 political declaration was so central to Russian thinking at the time that—and this is truly remarkable—it not only reflected the view of the Kremlin back in the 1980s but still today, forty years later, in the 2020s, at a time the Kremlin is part of a totally different national entity and Soviet Communism literally no longer exists.

Those Proof readers who have read the New York Times bestseller Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019) know that Putin’s chief foci after Ukraine right now are (i) battling the United States for influence and authority in the Persian Gulf, (ii) getting the U.S. out of having any involvement in Europe, and (iii) asserting dominance in East Asia through a partnership with China that attempts to limit American influence in that part of the world, which American influence historically has run through Japan.

In other words, in all his public political statements for forty years Donald Trump has, wittingly or unwittingly, been carrying water for Russian intelligence and doing so so competently that we still today would say his foreign policy is exactly what the Kremlin is angling for. We might also note that Trump focuses his attention on foreign nations which, because they’re autocracies, can be bribed; that is, to the extent Trump’s foci are pecuniary rather than geopolitical, it would still make sense for him to placate and aggrandize Russia, China, India, and Brazil as he is already doing daily because (a) those are the world’s largest business markets, (b) those are the markets that are least interested in regulation related to foreign corruption, and (c) all those markets will subsist and thrive if the world is broken up among the Killer States. So Trump, in his view, has every reason to work with (and even, indirectly, for) the whims of the largest autocracies on Earth, and in his mind there is no need to waste time with U.S. allies in Europe because, again simply in his view, they are Loser States destined to become vassals.

Does it make sense that Trump, even in this benighted view of Earth, is abandoning the continent of Europe to prospective (partial) Russian domination in the long term?

No. In fact, Trump’s doctrine not somehow extending to the United States contesting with Russia for influence in Europe or the Middle East—or for that matter with China in Oceania—is the reason many presume Trump has some sort of agency relationship with those nations. But there’s a far simpler explanation for this apparent oversight: Trump has needed Russian and Chinese aid in order to acquire power in America, and may well eventually need their support to hold it should he seize a third term illegally, so he has good reason to placate these nations and perhaps cede far more geopolitical territory to them than we might otherwise expect. After all, better the bird in the hand (America, which Trump currently runs) than pleasing 44 European nations in the bush.

{Note: We can also note that another part of the world, Africa, has no obvious Killer State, so it may be Trump’s view that once he and eventually his MAGA successors seize control over the Western Hemisphere, they’ll still have a whole continent to plunder—even if Europe has in part entered the shadow of the Kremlin. Moreover, at that point any remaining European nation-states might well still align with an autocratic America, along with much of Africa.}

Conclusion

Given all the foregoing, we can understand that it almost doesn’t matter what the result of the 1987 KGB recruitment of Trump was. We know for sure that after Trump spent days being wined and dined by KGB agents he adopted, and has maintained for the rest of his life, a foreign policy that (a) could easily be the Kremlin’s, but also (b) offers him plausible deniability as to its origin given that it dovetails perfectly with Fred Trump Sr.’s theory of success as applied to nation-states. Just as Fred Sr. would surely have said that a “killer” doesn’t allow anyone to get something from him for nothing, he’d surely have advised his son that a nation-state can’t be a “killer” if it’s ever taken advantage of, including by its so-called “friends.”

Trump appears to have added to such sociopathic thinking additional addenda, such as the idea that the media plays a major role in whether a man becomes a “killer” or not. Thus his apparent relationship with the free press: if/when he is a businessman and playing media like a fiddle by various means (including a fake Trump “publicist” named “John Barron” who was in actuality Trump himself), his actions prove him a killer; if/when he’s a politician and lets the Associated Press keep having access to him after it refuses to acknowledge his illegal renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, he’s a loser.

See how that works?

The idea that nations can be analogized to men in the purely Machiavellian world the late Fred Trump Sr. unfolded for his impressionable son could lead to the end of all life on Earth soon enough. There is, quite simply, no faster path to a world war than every nation realizing it can only avoid becoming a Loser State by getting nuclear weapons. (Consider, to that end, that this report hasn’t yet mentioned the nuclear powers North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, or—soon enough—Iran, as these are neither Killer States nor vassal states but nevertheless can have a place in Trump and Putin’s new world purely on the basis of their nuclear arsenals; so too, frankly, could the UK, France, and Germany even if Europe’s cohesion crumbles in the next fifty years. So too could Egypt if it gets American nuclear technology via the “Middle East Marshall Plan” Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner devised, as discussed in Proof of Conspiracy).

Trump will not live to see the fruition of his vision. He’s simply gotten too late of a start in politics. But given that he’s “only” 78 years old and his parents lived into their late eighties or early nineties, and given that he intends to rule the U.S. until a natural death still as many as fifteen years away, he can reasonably anticipate that a land-grab or two—Greenland, Panama, maybe a few Pacific or Atlantic islands, maybe denying potential applicants for American statehood that privilege but instead attaching them to existing states in ways that prevent them from harming Republicans in any future state or federal elections—will give him a chance to develop an “American Empire” in his lifetime. Then some venal family designee can continue the work after he’s gone.

What’s clear is that Trump is not, as long as he lives, going to change his view—one he’s held at least since 1987, so about forty years—that the United States after WWII wrongly allied itself with “losers” to its own detriment, with the predictable result being, in Trump’s mind, that we’ve turned into losers ourselves and are now being laughed at by the “jocks” at the “main table” in some notional high school cafeteria: Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. While he’s wrong that America is being laughed at by our allies, he’s probably not wrong, and indeed knows from first-hand dealings with the monsters who run the aforementioned five nations, that they do see America as weakened by its democracy, not strengthened by it.

What’s likewise clear is that Trump will spend the rest of his natural life working toward a mafia-like congregation of autocracies—a New Axis of Evil—that America is a co-equal part of (rather than a leader in, as Killer States don’t allow themselves to be subservient to anyone). He’ll continue America’s evident shift away from future inextricable entwinings with “losers,” in other words democracies writ large and most particularly the ones in Europe. He’ll also, however—and this is critical—seek out new vassal states in the way China has done (with North Korea), Russia has done (with Belarus), and to a lesser extent India is doing (with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal).

Trump’s minerals deal with Ukraine is a deal with a temporary vassal state. He may not do the unthinkable and try to annex any part of Canada, but he can certainly try to make it and Mexico into semi-vassal states (as both already do rely considerably on the United States). He can forge relationships with lesser powers in Central America and South America, such as El Salvador and Argentina, that position them as distant vassal states, and indeed the agreement he’s apparently already signed to use the former nation to imprison American citizens literally frames it as a U.S. penal colony.

But autocracies specifically, and Killer States generally, aren’t solely defined by their foreign policy. Internally, such nation-states tend to have a class of oligarchs who are beholden to the chief autocrat for their continued wealth and therefore, when and as it’s demanded of them, and deploy that wealth on behalf of the State’s interests (which are coextensive with those of the “killer” head-of-state). Thus we see Trump quickly establishing an oligarch class alongside the aforementioned stable of potential vassal states: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andresseen, Miriam Adelson, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and their ilk are Trumpist oligarchs, just as Greenland may become a U.S. vassal state if Trump wills it, boots on the ground or no.

If you understand the foregoing, you understand everything the second Donald Trump administration is doing right now. That includes actions that are otherwise almost historically indecipherable. Meeting with Russia and Saudi Arabia when you’re supposed to be negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine? It makes sense if you understand that Trump sees Ukraine as a vassal state—a Loser State that is due to be consumed, literally or metaphorically, by either Russia or the United States—and therefore one that deserves no place at a table with three “killers” (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States). Implying that China won’t get any pushback from the United States if it invades Taiwan? Why not? Taiwan, under the Trump Doctrine, is a Chinese vassal state. Beijing can therefore do whatever it likes with it. Are you still confused about how Trump speaks of Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama? Don’t be: he deems all of these as “should-be” American vassal states worth being treated with open contempt at worst and benign condescension at best. Why does Europe not have a seat at the table in Trump’s “Russia-Ukraine” negotiations? For the very same reason Ukraine doesn’t: the nations of Europe are Loser States to Trump, and thus are destined to fall apart. He has no interest in helping them forestall that eventuality, and probably deems himself to be magnanimous for giving them the “advice” to at least try to become “killers” (as that’s how we should read his admonishment of them for not doing enough to take care of their own protection from global bad actors like Russia).

Trump’s view is that America “owns” Ukraine geopolitically due to its investments there, and that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden therefore wrongly allowed a U.S. vassal state to dictate the terms of America’s foreign policy. He’s decided that that must end now. He simply has no interest in what Ukraine wants anymore. His attitude is that Ukraine is so in hock to America that it’ll never get out of debt, and therefore must shut up and remain respectful as the “killers” meet to determine how to make themselves whole and hand out the parts of Ukraine as they feel entitled to.

Trump has zero interest in punishing Russia for its war crimes and kidnappings and brutal executions because in engaging in such actions Russia is acting—in Trump’s view—exactly as it should: like a “killer.” And just as one mafia don doesn’t deign to police how another mafia don handles his business, Trump sees no role at all for the United States in dictating ethics to Russia or China or India or Saudi Arabia or Israel or the United Arab Emirates, and indeed sees a great deal to be lost in overstepping his bounds and inadvertently telegraphing to these killers that he doesn’t understand the rules of the game. Trump would equate caring about how the Russians or Chinese or Indians act within their borders to weakness—a feminine hand-wringing that’s far beneath the alpha male he deems himself to be, his orange makeup and his absurd ties notwithstanding.

So that’s how far Donald Trump is from judging Putin for his crimes, whether it’s the war crime of invading Ukraine or the domestic crime of ordering the assassination of Alexei Navalny and an untold number of Russian journalists. That’s how far Trump is from stopping Benjamin Netanyahu—a killer if ever there was one—from continuing to turn Gaza into a parking lot. Just so, Saudi Arabia can do what it likes in Yemen, and Trump may even join the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a war against Iran if he thinks that will lead to the support of those nations down the line for an American Empire in the Western Hemisphere (which, incidentally, it almost certainly would).

One final note about the Trump Doctrine: it’s not an encompassing worldview. Yes, if we add up all the Killer States and Loser States and in-between “vassal states” of the Killer States, and if we then add in a handful of known Neutral States, it seems like a pretty comprehensive view of the universe of powerful and impactful nations now on Earth, but the fact remains that probably fifty to a hundred nations don’t meet any of those definitions. Why? Because for now they’re too poor to rate geopolitically, at least in the view of a mercantilist like Donald Trump. So most of America, most of Central America, large swaths of Oceania, and even certain parts of South America are outside Trump’s consideration simply because they haven’t even joined his real-world version of Game of Thrones yet.

{Note: Many of these nations have ample natural resources, however, so once Donald Trump has established his American Empire, we can be reasonably certain he’d move quickly to begin pillaging certain of these nation-states through “trade negotiations” conducted at the barrel of an implicit or even an explicit gun.}

As we can see from all the foregoing, Trump removing America from NATO is more or less a foregone conclusion, as is removing the EU from negotiations over Ukraine.

Less obviously but no less forcefully, Trump’s apparent intention of withdrawing from the world for the purposes of creating hemispheric hegemony will require the U.S. to assert itself abroad in more clandestine ways—via private mercenaries rather than full-scale military encroachments—which is why we can be certain that Erik Prince will soon reappear, along with the rest of the absolute worst people on Earth, to offer up to America their services as actual killers, foreign pillagers, and election ratfuckers.

Is all this rather bewildering? Yes, sure.

But there’s no time for anyone to be confused about any of the above, as it so entirely explains so many aspects of what Donald Trump is doing right now with respect to American foreign policy that failing to understand it simply isn’t an option anymore.

The statement President Biden once made about this century—that it’s a long war between autocracies and democracies—is correct, and essentially determinative of what the medium-term outcome will be with NATO, Gaza, Panama, Greenland, Mexico, the European Union, Ukraine, Taiwan, and basically everywhere on Earth everyone is awakening to America being unambiguously a bad actor in league with bad actors.

To put a still finer point on it, anything that you think Vladimir Putin would do is something a “killer” would do and is therefore something Trump would do and is hoping to do inside the United States if and when anyone anywhere gives him an excuse to declare martial law. This includes arresting his political opponents on obviously manufactured evidence, taking out media outlets by fiat, arresting his fiercest critics and troublesome journalists en masse, prohibiting mass protests, ignoring court orders, suspending the U.S. Constitution, and even going as far as to—making no bones about it—name himself a king over a nation that promised in 1776, in writing no less, that it would have no more of them.

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