In the August 2016 issue of Harper's Magazine, Martin Amis wrote: 'In recent years the G.O.P. has more or less adopted the quasi-slogan "There is no downside to lying".' (Don the Realtor:The rise of Trump) https://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/don-the-realtor/
The Oval Office in the White House it seems has been re-purposed as a television set for a bizarre reality show. If the protagonists were not motivated by cruelty and the promotion of ignorance the absurd dialogues would be something to laugh at. Unfortunately, instead, what goes on there is extremely disturbing. All the more so, because the chief amongst them has repeatedly shown that he has no intention of heeding judgements of law, and is an inveterate liar, who switches the narrative whenever it suits.
When there is no regard for due process there is dictatorship. His best friends are dictators.
His underlings have imbibed of the same mad-making elixir of having power over others. It is reported that when another ten people were expelled to the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot) in El Salvador a few days ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that 'the alliance' between President Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador had 'become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.' Such a strange statement in view of the reality. More like an example of barbarism and state violence brought on by desperation.
Profound social inequality and decades of repressive, military-dominated rule caused unrest that culminated in a civil war in El Salvador during the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The left-wing insurgency was militarily and politically capable but the United States backed the Salvadoran Armed Forces.
There were United Nations-mediated peace accords in 1992 providing a path for democratisation and removal of the military from the political sphere. Natural disasters hampered efforts and with poor economic growth and social inequality persisting, crime became the flourishing element.
More than one million Salvadorans left the country for the United States. Since the civil war remittances from those working there played an important role in the Salvadoran economy.
El Salvador under the authoritarian rule of Bukele now has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
More than 70,000 people have been detained under the 'state of exception', an emergency measure granting draconian powers to the police and military that has been in force for more than three years.
Local and international human rights groups warn that thousands of those detained under the state of exception have no discernible links to gang crime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man from Maryland whose deportation to El Salvador last month was at first said to be an administrative error. But as with everything in this error-prone administration, in the face of continued non-compliance with court orders for his return, the story is undergoing renovation. Now despite there being no real evidence, he is a gang member.
Bukele is very popular because people no longer live in fear of gang violence. A lot has been invested in this prison of last resort. But what is the human cost? What do we become when we fail again and again to invest in people and allow them to have their own power in their own lives?
Trump wants his attorney-general to find if it can be considered lawful to send American convicted criminals to Cecot.
The Trump administration has used the 1978 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members. Regarding the use of that law the Supreme Court justices have said that deportees must be given the chance to challenge their removal. An unsigned decision states: 'the notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.'
The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy institution has stated regarding the use of that law: 'It is an overbroad authority that may violate constitutional rights in wartime and is subject to abuse in peacetime.'
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by Trump during his first term, agreed with the liberal justices who wrote that the administration’s 'conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.'
To disappear: (of a person) to go missing, especially as a consequence of abduction or arrest for political reasons, followed by secret imprisonment or murder.
The bilateral meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was a farce enacted in the Oval Office. The self-proclaimed 'world's coolest dictator' apparently cannot expedite the return of a man to the United States who since 2019 has had protected immigration status whose deportation was claimed to be an administrative error. He treated the matter as a joke asking the reporters present how he could be expected to smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Trump sat beside him smiling complicitly.
These are men who have no regard for anything that normal people care about. They turn that care around into a weakness. They are the so-called 'strongmen'. They lie and cheat their way to power and lie and cheat and bully to maintain that power.
During that same meeting Trump again turned a true story into a false account regarding Putin's missile attack on Ukrainian citizens celebrating Palm Sunday, claiming that it was a mistake that wouldn't have happened if Zelensky hadn't started the war.
Humans have always throughout history searched for and loved, truth and justice. And will continue to do so.
