Like many Americans, I’ve been watching with fascinated horror the Trump administration’s first big steps towards mass deportation, and wrote about the political underpinnings of the issue at New York:
To those who are worried about the threat to the rule of law represented by the first president to enter the White House as a convicted criminal, the brinkmanship being exhibited by Team Trump over court orders involving an erroneously deported immigrant seems ominous.
The Trump administration has been taunting the judiciary via dilatory tactics and obfuscation in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This protected-status immigrant from El Salvador, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has three children, was shipped off to a brutal Salvadorian rent-a-prison without due process, based on a faulty identification.
U.S. district court judge Paula Xinis has ordered the administration to find and return Abrego Garcia so that he can receive due process prior to deportation, and a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court concurred that the order must be obeyed, albeit with some consideration of the complications of the case. But even though Judiciary Department lawyers have admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of an error, the White House has stalled in complying with Xinis’s order. And in a bizarre Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president (and self-described dictator) Nayib Bukele, Trump and his attorney general suggested it was now Bukele’s problem. The Salvadoran leader said he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. Right there in front of the cameras, White House policy director and infamous nativist Stephen Miller misstated the Supreme Court decision and kept referring to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, the disputed attribution at the very center of the legal case. It all seemed like an extended mockery of the rule of law.
The administration is clearly playing rope-a-dope on the entire situation. And while it may ultimately comply with the courts, extract Abrego Garcia from prison, and give him a real hearing, the political question is why Team Trump is dragging this out in the glare of global bad publicity. Is this really the ground on which the 47th president will trigger a much-feared constitutional crisis by openly defying the judicial branch of government, including the Supreme Court that has been so very good to him? That’s what a lot of Trump critics believe is happening before our incredulous eyes.
I personally believe the administration will eventually submit to the courts, albeit as minimally as possible. But it’s possible Team Trump thinks the president’s foreign-policy powers, which they claim are at stake in such cases, are strong enough that it’s the Supreme Court that will submit to Trump’s authority to do as he wishes with immigrants.
Politically speaking, this is a fight the administration is eager to take on even if it temporarily loses, because it’s all happening on Trump’s favored turf at the intersection of the immigration and crime issues. At a time when the president is losing popularity steadily thanks to his economic policies, and particularly his tariff policies, it’s probably a relief to get back to the argument that America is succumbing to an “invasion” by criminal immigrants eager to rape, pillage, and eat pets. It seemed to have worked in 2024. Why not in 2025?
Recent polls regularly confirm that of all the controversial things Trump has done in the first 11-plus weeks of his second term, his handling of immigration policy is the most popular. This is true in polls that rate his overall job performance negatively (an April 8 Economist–YouGov survey giving him a net minus-seven approval rating overall but a plus-six approval rating on immigration) and positively (an April 10 Harvard–Harris survey giving him a net plus-two approval rating overall but a plus-seven approval rating on immigration). It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that when the full implications of the Trump-Miller immigration agenda become manifest, particularly when legal immigrants and even citizens are affected, this general-public approbation will fade or even head due south. Indeed, pollster G. Elliott Morris has published an analysis arguing that support for Trump’s positions declines steadily as questions about them become more specific:
“[W]hen various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as [El Salvador’s] CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.”
So the administration may be guilty of rhetorical overreach on immigration at a time when the mass-deportation program is actually going pretty slowly. But what about all the constitutional fears raised by cases like that of Abrego Garcia? Won’t Americans recoil at those signs of a presidency determined to become imperial? Maybe not.
Team Trump has clearly internalized one of the big lessons of the 2024 presidential election: that threats to “the rule of law” or “the Constitution” or “democracy” don’t mean a lot to persuadable voters who are most concerned about living costs and their own sense of well-being. If what Trump tried to do on January 6, 2021 doesn’t rise to the level of a voting issue for well over half the electorate, then is there any reason to believe that Abrego Garcia’s “due process” rights will matter? What is “due process,” anyway? Like the “presumption of innocence” from which Abrego Garcia should also benefit, it’s a legal concept that an awful lot of regular folks either don’t understand or find problematic, particularly when applied to someone the president of the United States has labeled an alien criminal terrorist.
So Team Trump is happy to defy the rule of law, at least at a level short of overt defiance, in any controversy involving immigrants. It pleases the nativist MAGA base immensely to see the administration run circles around “activist judges” in ridding the country of the people Democrats allegedly brought in to “replace” the country’s historic white majority. And it’s unclear at this point that Democrats and other Trump critics can make smash-and-grab ICE operations that land peaceful American residents in overseas hellholes as frightening as they should be. But as with the increasingly unpopular Trump tariff program, the immigration agenda may lose support the longer, the louder, and the more chaotic it becomes.
Thanks. I’d never have known about this fracas if you hadn’t so helpfully charted it for me.
Thanks. I’d never have known about this fracas if you hadn’t so helpfully charted it for me.
ducdebrabant:
Thanks for this perceptive comment. It helped remind me that Gerson wasn’t complaining about extremist web sites (which, as you note, really are worrisome), but about anonymity and the alleged “infection” of respectable sites by anti-semites on the comment threads.
In my own experience with high-comment-volume sites, those that “ban” crazy people do a reasonably good job, and on those that don’t ban crazy people, peer ostracism usually gets the job done. As you say, anonymity is largely irrelevant. Serious crazies don’t mind identifying themselves. Poseurs and agents provocateurs (along with a lot of folks with legitimate reasons for failing to disclose their identities) may use pseudonyms, but they are not the problem.
Gerson’s barking up the wrong tree, aside from his huge blind spot about radio, cable and right-wing opinion generally.
Ed Kilgore
Gerson’s original argument has some merit — message boards are indeed polluted with racist screeds. I myself worry more about more subtle screeds — disinformation with links to WorldNet Daily, etc. Not all of the bad actors in our culture are so helpful about flagging themselves with racist slurs and the use of the caps lock.
But still, the basic argument is that comments sections and message boards matter. On this point I agree with Gerson more than Klein. Lies proliferate on Twitter, and if you try and respond to them all (I know this from personal experience) they’ll suspend your account for spamming. I’m not as sanguine about Gerson’s own suggested solutions, though.
One solution he offers is more monitoring, but there are problems with aggressive monitoring too. The lag in posting time prevents conversation (you might spend half the day waiting for your reply to appear), and the poorly paid grunts that do it get a power complex.
For example, (another thing I know from personal experience) you can’t suggest Roland Martin’s support for Roland Burris may have been influenced by his race and expect your comment to be posted in Martin’s CNN message board. And if you point out to Jack Cafferty on his Cafferty File board that right wing craziness is mouthed on CNN itself — by guests on Lou Dobb’s show, AND by Lou Dobbs — the administrator will delete all references to Dobbs before he posts your edited comment.
Yet another thing I know from personal experience: if you happened to notice that Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire was bullet no news about the Prop 8 fight in California, and asked him to, he not only didn’t do it, not only deleted your posts when you tried to discuss the matter under any other topic, but banned you from posting at all.
The second solution Gerson suggests is that nobody should be allowed to post under a username — you should have to sign everything with your own identity. That idea chills me to the bone. Maybe Sicilians should have to do that before they criticize the Mafia on message boards; I wonder how that would work out.
If your next door neighbor believes abortion doctors should be shot on sight, and you do not, you can express it anyplace now on the internet without your neighbor finding out and leaving cow’s blood on your stoop at night. I’m not sure at all that making people own up publicly to all their own comments is the way to avoid intimidating behavior in society.
What I’m most worried about regarding anti-Semites and the Internet isn’t so much the anti-Semitic railing on regular websites but the use of specifically anti-Semitic blogs and boards to cluster and organize. It’s not that anti-Semites are going to convert everybody on the message boards of respectable news organizations, but that lonely anti-Semites in Oregon will meet lonely anti-Semites in Utah, and they’ll organize retreats and get-togethers, and uh, activities….
And although that may be a drop in the ocean of the Internet, I don’t think such sites should be dismissed too easily. Also, factually speaking, when Gerson brings up the Holocaust Museum shooter (in what he thinks is his aha moment) he’s bringing up an individual whose blogging on the Internet WAS under his own name, and who WAS therefore known by name to law enforcement organizations and the Southern Poverty Law Center. We don’t have preventive detention in this country (well, we’re not supposed to), but thanks to the Internet, the guy was at least on the radar.
Finally, yes, I agree with Klein in taking hate radio more seriously than I take the Father Coughlins of the Net. Limbaugh and Savage and Liddy are often just as bad as all but the worst neo-Nazis and Klansmen on the web, and their audience is much larger. When you look at polls, and at how many Americans now think Obama is foreign born or a secret Muslim, it’s shocking. These things may circulate on message boards, but they circulate on right wing radio and TV too, to bigger effect. Gerson may not want to talk about that, and may want to whitewash his compatriots, but it’s still true. If he condemns it one place, why so ostentatiously refuse to condemn it everywhere?
And don’t tell me more people don’t believe what they hear on Rush Limbaugh’s show more readily than what they read an anonymous poster screaming on the Net. Limbaugh addresses great big Republican groups, who cheer him to the rafters. The Washington tea party protesters kept saying they were there because of Glenn Beck. Why is Gerson defending as free speech from Beck or Limbaugh what he wants an administrator to delete when Joe Anybody says it?
Glenn Beck isn’t a racist because Klein disagrees with him. Glenn Beck is a racist because he claims the white race is being victimized and targeted by Barack Obama’s concealed hatred of the white race. He’s not a Nazi because he disagrees with us; we disagree with him because he’s a Nazi. It’s a bit like telling Jesse Owens his only problem with Hitler is that he insists on being Jesse Owens.
Hate speech is a seamless robe worn now by far too much of the right, and it’s harder than ever to tell the mainstream on the right from the fringe. Gerson can’t obscure that by making artificial distinctions between the hate speech of syndicated speakers and the hate speech that appears at the sufferance of privately owned message boards. It doesn’t smell any better just because somebody’s getting paid for it.