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Best guess: If you don't happen to love golf or imagine the world as a golf course, you're on the wrong planet these days. And that's true in so many different ways. Okay, it's also true that, unlike what I feared, I don't have to rush out and buy myself a new smartphone to replace the ancient one I still use because Donald Trump suddenly took most of his soaring tariffs off phones and computers (at least for the time being). But we all still find ourselves in an ever more bizarre and difficult world. And count on one thing, with three years and nine months of his presidency left, it's only likely to get far worse, especially if the global and U.S. economies continue to weaken. Recessions, depressions, a major financial crisis? Who really knows? But I wouldn't count on a ton of cheery economic tidings any time soon. That, of course, is not good news for either Donald Trump or his backers, but it's undoubtedly worse news for the rest of us, given what he's likely to do if he finds himself pushed ever more awkwardly against a wall.
In the meantime, King Trump -- and given the way he's already largely ignored both Congress and the courts, such a title hardly seems inappropriate -- has clearly been having the time of his life (and I'm not just thinking about golf and his million-dollar meals). Despite recently being forced to back down economically in a distinctly shaky fashion, he continues to have little patience for anyone but himself, and he's already taken out after those he thinks of as his enemies -- whether law firms, colleges, or former officials.
Here's the thing: as the world situation continues to worsen (and my guess is that it will), count on Trump -- as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon lays out so vividly today -- the very man given immunity by the Supreme Court in his last term for almost any "official" act, to continue trying to gather ever more power for a presidency which, in this century, has been growing more powerful in novel and disturbing (as well as unnerving) ways. Let Gordon explain. Tom
Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers
Planted by Bush and Cheney
In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their "black sites." For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), "black sites" was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on a rural road in Albania.
It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the wrong man. They wanted some other Khalid el-Masri, thought to be an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker, that "car salesman from Bavaria."
El-Masri was not the only person that representatives of the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly sent off to another country to be tortured. In an infamous case of mistaken arrest, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar was detained by the FBI at JFK Airport in New York while on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held in solitary confinement for two weeks in the United States, while being denied contact with a lawyer before ultimately being shipped off to Syria. There, he would be tortured for almost a year until the Canadian government finally secured his release.
An "Administrative Error"
I was reminded of such instances of "extraordinary rendition" in the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration's March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego GarcÃa to a grim prison in El Salvador. Because of threats against him and his family from Barrio 18, a vicious Salvadoran gang, Abrego GarcÃa had fled that country as a young teenager. He entered the U.S. without papers in 2011 to join his older brother, already a U.S. citizen.
He was arrested in 2019, while seeking work as a day laborer outside a Home Depot store and handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which accused him of being a member of another Salvadoran gang, MS-13. This proved a false claim, as the immigration judge who heard his case agreed. While not granting Abrego GarcÃa asylum, the judge assigned him a status -- "withholding from removal" -- which kept him safe in this country, because he faced the possibility of torture or other violence in his homeland. That status allowed him to work legally here. He married a U.S. citizen and they have three children who are also U.S. citizens.
Then, on March 12, 2025, on his way home from his job as a sheet-metal apprentice, he was suddenly stopped by ICE agents and arrested. They told him his status had been revoked (which wasn't true) and promptly shipped him to various detention centers around the country. Ultimately, he was deported to El Salvador without benefit of legal assistance or a hearing before an immigration judge. As far as is known, he is now incarcerated at CECOT, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorists, a Salvadoran prison notorious for the ill treatment and torture of its inmates. While built for 40,000 prisoners, it now houses many more in perpetually illuminated cells, each crammed with more than 100 prisoners (leaving about 6.5 square feet of space for each man. It is considered "one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere" with "some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system." Furthermore, among the gangs reported to have a substantial presence at CECOT is Barrio 18, the very crew Abrego GarcÃa fled El Salvador to escape so many years ago.
The Trump Justice Department has now admitted that they made an "administrative error" in deporting him but have so far refused to bring him home. Responding to a Supreme Court ruling demanding that the government facilitate his return, the Justice Department on April 12th finally acknowledged to the D.C. district court that he "is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador." Its statement continued: "He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador." On April 14, 2025, in contemptuous defiance of the supreme court, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele made it clear to reporters that Abrego GarcÃa will not be returning to the United States.
Previously, the government's spokesman, Michael G. Kozak, who identified himself in the filing as a "Senior Bureau Official" in the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, had failed to comply with the rest of Judge Paula Xinis's order: to identify what steps the administration is (or isn't) taking to get him released. The judge has insisted that the department provide daily updates on its efforts to get him home, which it has failed to do. Its statement that Abrego GarcÃa "is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador" suggests officials intend to argue that -- despite paying the Salvadoran government a reported six million dollars for its prison services -- the United States has no influence over Salvadoran actions. We can only hope that he really is still alive. The Trump administration's truth-telling record is not exactly encouraging.
Extraordinary Rendition
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