As Trump passed his 100th day in office, he served up two visions of the military: first, he scrapped a program offering mortgage relief to thousands of veterans and their families at risk of having their homes foreclosed. Then, a day later, the army, which has been embroiled in controversy recently because of its intimate role in both policing the border and deporting immigrants to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador in the face of court orders, announced that Trump would be getting the military parade that he has been clamoring for since the early days of his first presidency. The parade will be held on his birthday—think North Korea, anyone?—and will involve 6,600 troops and their equipment parading through the center of DC, at a likely cost of many tens of millions of dollars.
The priorities are clear: programs that help vets, from the above-mentioned mortgage relief program through to the staffing for mental health services run by the VA, are being slashed, while the military is converted into a pageant show for fluffing Trump’s ego and for ramping up the clamp down against asylum seekers on the southern border, bringing the armed forces into a law enforcement role that comes perilously close to violating the Posse Comitatus.
The vast numbers of vets slated to head to DC on June 6, the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings, to join the veterans’ protest against this Administration’s cuts, aren’t impressed. Nor are the courts.
Last week, a Trump-appointed judge declared Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify military flights of deportees to El Salvador’s CECOT concentration camp to be illegal; and twenty UN human rights experts recently signed a statement declaring that these deportations violated international law. Lower court judges have begun a process to hold Administration officials in contempt of court for these deportations; and the Supreme Court has ordered the Administration to “facilitate” the return to the US of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported in “error” to CECOT.
Rachel Mills
Trump’s response? After weeks of maintaining the fiction that his administration was powerless to demand Garcia’s return from El Salvador, last week MAGA man admitted he could have Garcia returned if he wanted to, but that he didn’t want to. That’s as clear a middle-finger to the judiciary as any I have ever seen. Compounding the sin, this weekend Trump answered “I don’t know” when asked whether he had to uphold the constitution and the right to due process when it came to immigrants.
Just to be clear here, the Constitution does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens when it comes to due process. Everyone within the US is entitled to due process. Also, just to be remind readers of what should be obvious: on January 20, when Trump was sworn in, he took the oath of office. That oath does not say that the president can pick and choose when to act in accordance with the law, or that he can unilaterally rewrite inconvenient parts of the country’s founding document. Rather, it declares, "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Instead, with the connivance of Congressional Republicans Trump is attempting to rule as a king. He continues to scrap congressionally mandated and funded programs unilaterally, from USAID to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. And his proposed budget for next year, ghastly in about a million different ways, envisions a wholesale destruction of publicly funded health, environmental, and artistic programs.
The rot doesn’t stop at the top. Trump’s border czar, the hard-boiled Tom Homan, who always manages to look like a hoodlum in a mediocre 1930s crime movie, has recently been threatening to arrest Wisconsin governor Tony Evers for Evers’s role in enforcing state laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. (Late last year, Homan also threatened to arrest the Denver, Colorado, mayor, should he stand in the way of immigration sweeps.)
In case anyone thinks the promise to arrest public officials is an idle threat, last month the FBI did indeed arrest a Wisconsin judge, Hannah Dugan, for allegedly letting an immigrant out of the side-door of her courtroom while ICE officers waited in the hallway to arrest him. The judge was frog-marched out of the courthouse in handcuffs, while FBI chief Kash Patel tweeted out incendiary comments about her actions. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly ranted about “communist” judges impeding his agenda.
And last week, ex-cyber security chief Chris Krebs, who angered Trump after the 2020 election by pushing back against the outgoing president’s claims of voter fraud, was removed from the Global Entry travel program because nameless government agencies were apparently investigating him. Also last week, Trump ordered the IRS to move to end Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, thus politicizing the tax agency to an unprecedented degree as he seeks to make an example of the country’s oldest, and most famous, university.
To return to a question I asked in my last column: if you’re suspicious of Big Brother-type government, after 100 days of this Administration do you not think, just maybe, that it’s time to start protesting such outrageous government overreach?
