How the Republic Falls

Constitutional protections suspended. The government purging “alien enemies” and the “enemy within.” Three months into Trumpist rule, despotism is rising in America

iStock / credit: Jorm Sangsorn

On some days, the Trumpist regime’s assault on democratic self-government crystallizes in events that have such a visceral effect on anyone who dares to pay attention that it can feel overwhelming. Monday, April 14 – Day 85 since Trump took power – was such a day for me.

Over the preceding weekend, officials from the Department of Justice had made it clear that the Trump administration had no intention of complying with a unanimous Supreme Court order from April 10 that demanded the government “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. A month earlier, on March 15, Garcia had been deported illegally, as the Court found. Fleeing gang violence in El Salvador, Garcia came to the United States as a teenager. In 2019, due to the immediate threat from the same violence he had fled, an immigration court granted him “withholding from removal” status, meaning he was, at the time he was arrested, living in America legally. He has not been charged with, let alone convicted of a crime. He’s not had a chance to appear in court to make his case to a judge. And yet, Garcia was flown to El Salvador and put into a prison labor camp, the so-called “Terrorism Confinement Center.” In fact, even the Trump administration had initially admitted Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.” Yet instead of trying to correct that “error” and comply with court orders, the Trumpists have engaged in an all-out propaganda campaign to portray Garcia as a dangerous criminal (no evidence) and a member of MS-13 (an accusation based on the testimony of a discredited confidential informant and, somehow, the fact that Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey).

The Trump administration does not want to bring Garcia back, that much is evident. They don’t care about his humanity or his rights, everything else follows from that. They don’t want him to talk and bear witness to the horror that is being inflicted in this prison labor camp, on people who have not even been charged with a crime. They don’t want to admit they actually have to follow court orders. And they fundamentally don’t believe they made a mistake: For the Trumpists, Garcia is an undesirable “Other” who must be purged from the nation, no matter his legal status.

What the Trump regime is really up to was on full display on the morning of April 14, as the president welcomed the Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele in the White House for a friendly chat among authoritarians. Also present was Attorney General Pam Bondi, who promptly declared it was “up for El Salvador if they want to return” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, “That’s not up to us.” This is complete nonsense, as the Trumpists know, considering that the American government is paying Bukele millions of dollars specifically for the privilege of being able to disappear people into his prison labor camp. Asked by the press to chime in, Bukele mocked the very idea that he would even consider releasing Garcia: “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.” The idea that the American government would comply with a unanimous Supreme Court order: “preposterous.” And if you ask Marco Rubio, who was also in the Oval Office last Monday, it’s preposterous for the courts to even weigh in at all: “No court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.”

As monstrous as the current arrangement with the Salvadoran dictator is, Donald Trump wants more. As he and Bukele came into the Oval Office, just before the press joined them, Trump was filmed saying: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.” The “home-growns,” that’s U.S. citizens.

This particular moment captured precisely what the Trumpist vision is. They want to eliminate habeas corpus entirely. Even if they grab you by mistake, you will have no habeas protection. And it won’t be a “mistake” for long: They will make up a reason for why you had to be disappeared without due process: You are a terrorist! Or a foreign invader! Or an acute threat to American foreign policy! And that is why you must never escape from the prison labor camp operated by the foreign dictator who is being paid by the U.S. government to lock you away. Once you are there, you’ll have no legal recourse whatsoever. No court gets to intervene – it’s all “foreign policy.” And it is entirely inevitable, in the logic of Trumpism as a political project, to include “home-gowns” in this scheme: This regime is built on the promise of purging not only the “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” but also the “enemy within” who is in cahoots with those nefarious outside forces to destroy “real America.”

Whatever you want to call what emerges here as the vision that animates the MAGA Right, “democracy” it sure ain’t. It’s not a republic either. Despotism is on the rise.

Purging dissidents who cause “a ruckus”

Since early March, the Trump regime has escalated its attempts to remove foreign nationals it deems undesirable from the country, its attacks on civil society institutions it deems insufficiently submissive, and its resulting confrontations with the courts. Throughout February, the public attention was rightfully focused on the authoritarian takeover of the government machinery and the Elon Musk-led destruction of whatever part of the state the tech-right considers hostile or useless. The unprecedented devastation of state capacity is certainly continuing. But over the past six weeks, the Trumpist assault on the rule of law and the constitutional order may have been most visible in the radicalizing attempt to purge the nation.

On the evening of March 8, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and leading activist during the 2024 Gaza protests at Columbia. The ICE agents tasked with detaining Khalil weren’t even aware that he was a permanent legal resident; they also didn’t care when they were informed and quickly transported Khalil to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where he has since been held.

Initially, there was quite a bit of confusion about what authority the Trump administration was invoking to arrest Khalil. He has not been charged with any crime. It turned out that the Trumpists were using a rather obscure clause in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that allows for people to be removed from the country if their continued presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” – a determination to be made by the Secretary of State.

This clause has since been used as an instrument in hundreds of cases, against students associated with the Gaza protests first, but increasingly against anyone who’s had any kind of contact with U.S. law enforcement – for a minor traffic violation, for instance. Students are rarely informed about the termination of their visa status. If they find out at all, it is because their universities happened to stumble upon a change in status in their records. This puts all these students at risk of being arrested by ICE, detained, and potentially deported into “countries other than their country of origin,” as the State Department has threatened.

What this “process” looks like in practice became clear to a broader public when video of the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk surfaced. Öztürk is a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University. On March 25, she was on her way home in Somerville, Massachusetts, when masked agents of the state, in civilian clothes, not even identifying themselves, snatched her up on the street. No crime has been alleged. The reason why Öztürk was arrested – or, rather: kidnapped – is that she had co-written an op-ed in a student newspaper in March 2024, criticizing the university’s response to the Gaza protests on campus.

Öztürk is being detained for what is undoubtedly constitutionally protected speech. The administration doesn’t care. In fact, they have explicitly stated that social media posts the State Department deems unacceptable might be enough for a termination of the visa status. And the regime has gone even further. On March 27, commenting on the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, Marco Rubio declared that “if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country.” Freedom of speech, the right to assemble, due process – the U.S. constitution explicitly grants these fundamental protections to all *people*, not just citizens. But no more. Constitutional rights now come with a disclaimer in America: “Unless the regime decides otherwise.”

Disappearing “alien enemies”

The day after Öztürk was arrested – and the day before Rubio declared constitutional protections suspended for anyone causing a “ruckus” – Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem visited the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador and published a video posing in front of a cell overcrowded with inmates. Noem thanked the Salvadoran dictator for his “partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here, and to incarcerate them and have consequences for the violence the have perpetuated in our communities.” The video is hard to watch. The complete disregard for the humanity of the people relegated to the status of extras in a gleefully abusive display of violent threat invoked the worst of modern history – from concentration camps to Abu Ghraib. It captured the vile, racist lawlessness and cruelty of the Trumpist regime.

As Noem was filming the video, she was well aware that most of the people the regime had just flown out to El Salvador and condemned to indefinite detention in a labor camp were not “terrorists,” but innocent men who had been in the United States legally. The Trump administration had rounded up hundreds of migrants from Venezuela, declared them members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization based on no credible evidence whatsoever, then declared Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and invoked the Alien Enemies Act to remove them all from the country without due process. They were flown out to El Salvador on March 15. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was on one of those planes with them (although in his case, the administration did not invoke the Alien Enemies Act, specifically).

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 should have been repealed a long time ago. It allows for broad, purely identity- and heritage-based discrimination to discern threats to national security. In the late eighteenth century, that may have made sense, as there was no domestic intelligence service or even a proper law enforcement apparatus. In the twenty-first century, it is outrageous. Before March, it had been invoked only three times: In the War of 1812 and during both World Wars – most infamously as the justification for the mass internment of Japanese immigrants in the 1940s. After every time it was invoked, the U.S. government realized it needed to apologize.

The Alien Enemies Act grants the executive emergency powers in times of “declared war” or when a foreign government threatens or undertakes an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” against U.S. territory. It would be up to Congress to declare a war, and that evidently has not happened. But the Trump regime claims these migrants are foreign “invaders,” akin to a hostile army occupying the land. If that wasn’t ridiculous enough yet, the government’s lawyers have simply not presented a coherent case for why they think they have the legal authority to not only remove these migrants but fly them out to a third country and dump them into a prison labor camp. The argument, if we want to call it that, seems to be that the Alien Enemies Act allows the regime to disregard due process and remove whoever it deems an “invader” from the country – and as soon as these “invaders” have left American territory, the matter is removed from judicial oversight according to the Article II powers of the president to conduct foreign affairs? It would be a loophole to justify amassing executive power and suspending fundamental rights large enough to end constitutional government in America.

From the start, the case of the three planes carrying hundreds of Venezuelans out of the country has received a lot of public attention – something the Trump administration had clearly hoped to avoid. Trump signed the Executive Order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday, March 14, which wasn’t made public until late afternoon the next day. However, there was a lot of reporting in the days leading up to the weekend, indicating this was about to happen, which prompted the ACLU to file a lawsuit on behalf of five of their clients, all Venezuelan men, who were already in detention (these men did not end up on the planes to El Salvador). That is why, when the Executive Order came out and news broke that hundreds of Venezuelans were being flown out of the country, hearings were already ongoing before the federal district court for the District of Columbia in Washington, DC. And the presiding judge James Boasberg ruled that all these people from Venezuela needed to remain in the country so that the process that immigration law dictates could actually play out: He ordered the planes that were already in the air to turn around. That, evidently, did not happen.

The rule of law vs the “will of the people”

The legal battles over the disappearing of Venezuelan migrants and the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia have been at the center of the escalating conflict between the Trump regime and the courts. Publicly, the Trumpists have long adopted a maximally aggressive posture. Trump has called judge Boasberg a “radical left lunatic” and called for his impeachment – which immediately prompted some Republicans in the House to introduce articles of impeachment and Elon Musk to donate a ton of money to exactly those House members. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has even publicly brought up the idea that maybe the Republican-led Congress should “eliminate” those federal courts that prove unruly – after all, he added, “desperate times call for desperate measures.” And hardly a day goes by without Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Homeland Security Advisor, and MAGA nativist leader Stephen Miller ranting against the “tyranny” those “rogue Marxist judges” are imposing on America, and his desire to squash that “far-left judicial riot.”

But in court, the government’s lawyers have, at least until recently, pursued a different strategy, oscillating between open acts of defiance on the one hand and an attitude of obscuring and evading without openly defying on the other. This incoherence has been indicative of the fact that there are still different ideas on the MAGA Right for how to handle the courts: There is one faction that would like to preserve plausible deniability and prefers a strategy of autocratic legalism, meaning they would rather remain within the confines of the law, at least nominally; and then there are the extremists who desire to escalate and properly go to war with the courts. Since late March, it seems pretty clear that the overall trajectory points towards escalation. Even in court filings, the Department of Justice has increasingly adopted an aggressive language towards judges. And on March 24, the DoJ informed the district court in Washington, DC that the government would not provide any further information regarding the deportation of the Venezuelan migrants and instead declared that the regime’s authority, because it derived from the “mandate of the electorate,” superseded and nullified any right of the court to intervene. That has indeed been the central claim of the Trumpist regime all along: “We” represent the true “will of the people” – how dare anyone stand in “our” way?

Cruel and deranged

The fate of these illegally deported migrants who have not been charged with any crime but are now incarcerated indefinitely in one of the most brutal, most inhumane environments imaginable has rightfully received a lot of public attention. How this is going to play out politically is hard to parse. The Supreme Court deciding unanimously against the Trump administration in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia seems to have given some Republican voters pause; Democratic elected officials like senators Christopher van Hollen and Cory Booker, who have traveled or are planning to travel to El Salvador to visit Garcia in person, seem to understand not just the moral urgency of the situation, but also the political opportunity to push back against the Trumpist assault. Donald Trump himself declared on April 17 that he was “not involved” in the case at all – which is obviously nonsense, but also perhaps a sign that he does not see this particular conflict as a political winner. That, however, has not kept him or his regime from doubling down on slandering Garcia in a deranged propaganda campaign. On April 19, for instance, the official White House account on ex-Twitter posted a picture of Donald Trump holding an obviously manipulated photo of what they called “Kilmar’s MS-13 Tattoos” (showing a hand that literally had “MS 13” tattooed on the knuckles).

These types of bizarre, unhinged actions aren’t just the work of far-right trolls – although they certainly are that too. They are also intended to compensate for the fact that the regime is not (yet) capable of realizing the promises of mass deportation that were so central to Trump’s election campaign. In fact, it has been reported that both the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security are advising against invoking the Insurrection Act, which would – at least as the Trumpists see it – enable the regime to deploy troops domestically and use them to round up migrants. It’s not that Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth have moral or legal qualms about going down that path. They just don’t think the regime has, as of right now, the capacity to detain so many people. In this context, disappearing Venezuelan migrants and foreign students serves as a stand-in for the mass purge that is not happening yet – certainly not on the scale Trump had announced. As such, the aggressive disregard for due process is as symbolically important as the casual cruelty. When Noem stands in front of inmates in El Salvador declaring that “this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit,” she is not just uttering a threat to America’s migrant communities. She is also addressing the rightwing base. The message to the MAGA faithful is, basically: “We promised you we would hurt the people you want to see hurt – and here is what we are delivering!” That doesn’t mean the MAGA Right is content with what they are “achieving” right now. Their commitment to purging the nation from anyone they deem “the Other” and “unworthy” is sincere. They want to escalate.

A democracy no more

It bears repeating: Just three months after Trump took power, we are now at the point where the regime considers the legal status of groups it declares unworthy or unwelcome as entirely conditional; constitutional protections can be revoked at any time, for an unspecified number of reasons that all boil down to “because the regime said so” based on the idea that you are causing a “ruckus,” or constitute a “threat,” or simply don’t belong here anymore according to the MAGA conception of “real America.” The regime gets to make that assessment without any discernible process, no need to present any credible evidence. Once the judgment is made, it will result in immediate arrest, detention, and potentially incarceration in a prison labor camp run by the Salvadoran dictator. Once a person is there, the regime gets to claim it has no more jurisdiction. Fundamental rights, explicitly guaranteed in the U.S. constitution for all *people*, not just citizens, can be suspended at the regime’s behest just long enough to transport “undesirables” to a place where the rule of law doesn’t exist, and human rights go to die. Whatever label or concept we think best describes this reality, a “democracy” it certainly is not.

Where does this end? Who is at risk? Anyone who stands in the way of the MAGA vision of purging the nation. “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Stephen Miller lied about Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week: “This was the right person sent to the right place.” Who cares what the law says: To the MAGA ideologues, Garcia is outside the boundaries of “real America,” he does not – and must never – belong to the Volk, the “real” people. This is a core tenet of the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” JD Vance proclaimed last September, when he was trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio based on vile lies and conspiracy theories he was instrumental in propagating. He knew the people he was targeting were in the United States legally. Yet for blood-and-soil nationalists like Miller and Vance, there is a “Higher Truth” that overrides all else: The “homeland” is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional.

The MAGA rage won’t be confined to migrants either. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It’s never far from “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” to “the enemy within.” In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders and by insidiously subversive forces on the inside. The “enemy within” – those Un-American forces of radical leftism and “globalist” elites – are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without. In order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be subjugated and purged. That is the core promise of Trumpism as a political project.

This is how the attempts to detain, deport, and disappear foreign nationals are directly connected to both the escalating attacks on universities as well as the assault on state institutions and the civil service. To the Trumpist Right, all of these institutions have been taken over by the “globalist” enemy within, they function as power centers for the “woke” elites, they fund and propagate their campaign to subvert and weaken the nation. In order to defeat this leftist threat, nothing short of a comprehensive “counter-revolution” to take back – or, if that proves impossible, destroy – these institutions will suffice. Once these institutions are either eliminated or controlled by the Right, they can no longer import “Un-American” ideas that challenge the white Christian patriarchal ethno-state; they can no longer delude and mislead “the people” into going against their true, nationalistic interest; they can no longer conspire to bring in dangerous foreigners and undeserving “Others.”

Despotism rising

“Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?” We should stop wasting time debating this question. It may suggest concern for the bigger picture – where does America stand? – but it actually achieves the opposite: A pointless focus on definitional questions, on lines that are drawn only to be constantly re-drawn and pushed further out. It is a discussion that has been, at best, unhelpful and, more often, actively misleading. It suggests a binary between “not a crisis yet” and “the crisis is here” that depends entirely on rather esoteric definitions. It obscures the reality that America crossed into what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” that space between a functioning democratic system and full-blown autocracy, well before the Trump government decided to ignore a unanimous Supreme Court order. Now, this debate is entirely obsolete. To what extent is the constitutional order still in effect? If we must ask, we are fully in a crisis situation; once we don’t have to ask anymore, the constitutional order will have already been overthrown.

What is it the Trumpists want? “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social and Ex-Twitter on February 15 – a quote usually attributed to Napoleon. There is obviously an element of trolling here, as is so often the case on the extreme Right and among those socialized in the radicalized rightwing online scene. But the Trumpists are also entirely sincere about these assertions of absolute power, unburdened by legal restraints and puny norms. They desire to transform America into some form of plebiscitary autocracy, constantly invoking the true “will of the people” and their “mandate” to restore former national glory while drastically narrowing the boundaries of who gets to belong, centralizing power to neutralize the opposition, curtailing the rights of those who dare to deviate, entrenching a tiered system of participation defined by hierarchies of race, gender, and wealth, and restoring white male dominance in elite institutions as well as across all spheres of American life.

Where will this end? America is not destined to become a dictatorship. The political conflict isn’t over, nor is the outcome determined, or democracy’s fate sealed for good. And that might ultimately be the hardest answer to accept: We cannot predict the contours of America’s political system or societal order five or ten years from now. In a stable democracy, the range of plausible outcomes should be narrow. But for America, it now includes complete democratic breakdown and full-blown despotic rule. As we are trying to navigate what is happening around us, we must widen our horizon of expectations far beyond what most of the mainstream political discourse is even now willing to ponder.