The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
By now you’ve heard that on Monday, President Donald Trump met with Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador. In an act of true infamy, the two fellow authoritarian leaders collectively agreed with one another that Kilmar Abrego Garcia will not be returned to the United States. This—even though the US has admitted that Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador was illegal. That was bad enough, but the specifics of their whole discussion made the whole thing into a truly extraordinary display of lawlessness. We’re going to work through all of this with Asawin Suebsaeng, a senior political reporter at Rolling Stone magazine and an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Cincinnati. He has a new piece arguing that Trump and his henchmen are openly, expressly mocking the Supreme Court, which has ruled on this. Great to have you back on, Swin.
Asawin “Swin” Suebsaeng: I wish it were under brighter circumstances, but it is always a pleasure to be on the pod with you, Greg.
Sargent: Thank you. It is extraordinarily dark right now. To catch everyone up: Abrego Garcia, who originally had a form of protection in the U.S. known as withholding from removal, could not be deported to El Salvador—but the Trump administration did just that, claiming an administrative error. The Supreme Court has ruled that Trump must facilitate his return to the U.S while sending the case back to a lower court to define precisely what the administration must do to effectuate this return. Trump was asked during his meeting with Bukele if he’ll abide by the Supreme Court. Here’s what he said.
Kaitlan Collins (audio voiceover): You said that if the Supreme Court said someone needed to be returned, you would abide by that. You said that on Air Force One just a few days ago. And they said it must be facilitated.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Why don’t you just say, “Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?” Why can’t you just say that?
Sargent: Swin, there you have it. Trump says Abrego Garcia is a criminal, even though he was never charged with any crime and his deportation was canceled by a judge. And therefore Trump won’t follow the Supreme Court. Your thoughts?
Suebsaeng: It was once agreed upon across virtually all partisan lines in American culture and politics that the old saying, “I would rather let 100 guilty men go free than imprison just one innocent man,” was a good thing. That was a principle that we as a society—and as a country that apparently pretends to value things like the rule of law—should live by, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or anything else. And I think one of the most perverse things that we’ve been seeing in recent weeks is that the second Trump administration isn’t just inverting that old saying completely and turning on its head, but they’re doing so very publicly, gratuitously, and gleeful[ly] in public, from the president of the U.S. on down. I’ve run out of polite ways to characterize it. And without saying the words fucking, fucking hell, we’re living in fucking hell right now over and over and over again to you, I think that is the most polite way I can characterize it to your listeners. And I think it be all downhill from here.
Sargent: Well, in the same meeting, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the following about whether Abrego Garcia will be returned, “It’s up to El Salvador if they want him returned.” Swin, this is just pure bullshit. The Trump administration can simply ask Bukele to turn him over so that the U.S. government can follow the ruling of our highest court, which is, again, that it facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. So where are we now with the chief law enforcement officer on the U.S. basically saying, We don’t have to do this. This is on the dictator of El Salvador to decide?
Suebsaeng: Just like you said earlier, it’s more lying, it’s more bullshit. All Donald Trump has to do is give a wink and a nod. It would take two and a half seconds, maybe fewer than that, for him to get the government in El Salvador to get this guy back on a plane to American soil—and they are just steadfastly refusing to do it. There are a multitude of reasons as to why, both absolutely cynical and absolutely other barbaric things. We have a new piece this week at rollingstone.com that’s based on our conversations with sources within and very close to the Trump White House and the Trump administration. And they laid out at least a few key reasons as to why they’re doing this and refusing to basically have this guy back with a flick of their finger.
Among the reasons they’re refusing to do that is—it’s a very cosmetic and very stupid one, but it’s one that runs deeply through the veins of the Republican Party right now, especially the Trumpified Republican Party—they really, really, really do not want to give the “media” a win on this. They don’t want to give people like you and me a win. They don’t want to give us a scalp by retreating on this. Donald Trump’s view and Stephen Miller’s view and J.D. Vance’s view and all of their views would be precisely that.
On a more practical, shall we say, and legal matter, there are senior lieutenants in Trump’s administration who are concerned that caving in on this case, even if they don’t believe that this guy in the darkest pit of their hearts did anything wrong, could set up a cascading effect where other people who they really want to keep down there in the torture prison in El Salvador will be able to bring their own special due process claims or challenges that could tear and tear and tear at the seams of this policy to a point that they really don’t want to happen.
And another part of it has to do with optics in their full-blown propaganda campaign. As much as they love to deport and rendition and remove and keep people out, a very effective tool with the second Trump administration is the propaganda war that they’re fighting that either scares people from trying to come to the U.S. or scares people who are undocumented—or even if they are documented but don’t necessarily have the exact status that a Trump or a JD Vance would “value”—from wanting to stay.
There are other key reasons there, but I think that maps out a pretty good roadmap as to why their propaganda, legal, and political fight to keep the draconian immigration matters going in a very sick and disturbing way starts and ends with this guy—who the administration cannot even seem to argue in even bad faith anymore actually really did anything wrong or suspicious. They just keep throwing out words like “terrorists” or “bad hombre” or whatever the fuck they keep saying.
Sargent: Well, here’s where Bukele comes in. Bukele, who has clearly been enlisted by the Trump administration to help Trump get away with what you’re talking about, was asked in this meeting if he will return Abrego Garcia. Listen to this.
Nayib Bukele (audio voiceover): The question is preposterous. How could I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.
Reporter (audio voiceover): So you could release him inside of El Salvador.
Bukele (audio voiceover): Yeah, but I’m not releasing. We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. I you just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of the Western Hemisphere and you want us to go back into the releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world. That’s not going to happen.
Trump (audio voiceover): Well, they’d love to have a criminal …
Bukele (audio voiceover): I mean, there’s a fascination.
Trump (audio voiceover): They would love it. Yeah, they’re sick. These are sick people.
Sargent: Swin, hearing that, we’re deep inside the fascist hall of mirrors right now. The U.S. says he’s a criminal, sends him to El Salvador, and the U.S. says it’s not up to us if he’s returned. It’s up to El Salvador. And then one dictator does another a solid and Bukele says, “Well, why would we return him? He’s a criminal. Why would we smuggle a criminal into the United States?” But the thing is, the U.S. is paying El Salvador to house these prisoners pursuant to our charges that they broke our laws. You see the circular thing that they’re doing here? This is a hallmark of fascism really, this type of communication.
Suebsaeng: Yeah. And beyond it being fascistic and as if some deranged online anime Nazi were making federal policy in most ad hoc way possible—and I mean this as blistering a negative remark as I hope it’s coming across to your audience—one of the worst things I can say about these first few months of the second Trump era is that it really does remind me in the marrow of my bones of what it felt like to live through the very worst abuses and excesses of the George W. Bush war on terror period. What I mean by that is when President Bush and his gang were doing all kinds of things like torture and war crimes, little goodies like that, for the most part—not entirely, but mostly—they tried to hide it a little bit. George Bush would go out there and say to the cameras, Mark my words, or something like that. America doesn’t torture. I do not torture. And of course, it was just complete fabrication lies. Of course he was.
What we have here with President Trump, and you can draw a direct line from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to him on matters like this, is as if George W. Bush went out there in the White House briefing room and told the press, Yeah, I do torture. What are you going to do to stop me? Come and fucking get it.
Sargent: That is exactly what it’s like. And I think the one of the big takeaways from this meeting is you could visibly see Trump feeling really, really empowered by the mere fact that he was sitting next to a fellow authoritarian. The whole thing was really grotesque and really, really unsettling in a profound way. Trump was coming into his own as a far-right authoritarian and fascistic leader before our eyes in this meeting.
Suebsaeng: Yeah, and he was having a hell of a time doing. He’s having the time of his life. He has never had more fun than he is right now.
Sargent: Right. And Swin, he was pissing all over the press in front of Bukele as if to say, See, I can knock around mind media just like you can knock around your opposition.
Suebsaeng: Whenever he hosts guys like this, whether guys like him or Netanyahu or what have yous in the Oval Office, it is the formation, as you said earlier: him coming really into his own as a global leader in right-wing and far-right authoritarian movements. He’s surrounded by his very powerful fanboys and cronies from other nations, of which the leader in El Salvador absolutely is when it comes to national or, should I say, international MAGA culture. And it’s like if the historic summit between the Beatles and Elvis went well, except for fascism. You can tell how great a time they’re having feeding on each other’s impulses and basis desires, which Trump is showing not even slowly but surely but very rapidly: Look at the courts occasionally trying to stop me. They can’t. The Democratic opposition can’t stop me. All of these different activist groups and the ACLU can’t stop me. Look at me. I’m just a mega version and a much wealthier version of all these other guys, whether they’re in the El Salvador or the Philippines or India or where have you. I’m just like you guys, and look at how I’m getting away with it in the supposed land of the free.
Sargent: Yeah, he’s essentially saying, Look, I’m aligned with them, not with liberal democracies anymore. In fact, at one point, Trump also strongly suggested he wants to start sending criminals who are U.S. citizens to El Salvador as well. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): They’re great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games. I’d like to go a step further. I said it to Pam. I don’t know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.
Sargent: Swin, as we know, Trump gets to say who is a criminal and who is not by fiat. This is more or less what his own people said at this meeting. So I still have a little bit of a tough time envisioning them rounding up U.S. citizens and sending them off to a foreign gulag, but what do you think? Where does this leave us? Do we really think he’ll get around to trying that?
Suebsaeng: I hate to break it to you, man: In a way, they already are. And I will tell you how that will sound more plausible in terms of what they’ve been trying to cook up in the bowels of the Trump DOJ or West Wing. Ever since he stepped back into office in late January, there have been serious policy discussions among senior lawyers and appointees within the Trump administration, including guys like Stephen Miller, where they want to get serious about a process that they tried to do during the first Trump presidency but it stalled out: to denaturalize naturalized U.S. citizens, essentially finding whatever justifications, whether bad faith or extremely bad faith or anything else, to strip certain people’s citizenship, including naturalized citizens who, let’s say, said something about the Palestine-Israel conflict that they didn’t like, or maybe some people who were accused, whether justly or unjustly, of being in a violent gang or gang affiliation. And then after that, deporting them the hell out of our country.
This is something that not only our anonymous sources within the administration have been telling us is going on and is being taken seriously—again, with the caveat of whether they actually are able to pull it off or not; at this point, I think we have to take them very, very, very seriously about their efforts—but it was also described to us on the record by Mike Davis, who is, of course, a very close Trump ally. [He] still communicates privately and personally with Donald Trump, and is very mobbed up and highly respected as a MAGA legal mind among not just the Republican Trumpist elite but the West Wing and Trump administration brass. And he just told us on the record, This is my position. This is what I would want President Trump to do. And while he was a little bit cute about it and said, I’m not going to get into the finer details about my private conversations with Trump or anybody in his inner circle, but I can tell you that they take my private counsel very seriously.
Sargent: What did he say?
Suebsaeng: He was specifically talking about “pro-Hamas” individuals who are naturalized American citizens—and have the heavy quotation marks on “pro-Hamas” because the Trump administration’s definition of “pro-Hamas” is resoundingly different than your own mind. Basically, if they’ve been naturalized within the past several years, to strip them of their citizenship, accuse them of lying on their citizenship form, and then, in his words, to get them the hell out of our country. So it’s basically a recipe for taking away your citizenship due to things including but not limited to thought crime, as according to MAGA and Donald Trump. And I almost said “deporting you,” which I guess technically would be, but really what it would be doing is kidnapping you and taking you outside of America’s borders. This is horrifying stuff. They keep talking about it both behind the scenes and in front of the scenes. And it is not good. I do not care for it.
Sargent: Yeah, I don’t either. So sum it up for us, Swin: How bad is it going to get?
Suebsaeng: I don’t want to make this sound like a dodge, but I would actually argue to you that it’s been less than three months and baby, we’re already there. It is significantly worse than even I [expected]—and I had a piss poor opinion of Donald Trump going into his second presidency. It is beneath the floor and beneath the lowly set bar that even someone like I had it at.
And so much of what we’re seeing now, including but really not at all limited to what you and I have been talking about for the past 20 minutes or so, are things that in a saner and “normaler” time—maybe even just a decade and a half ago, as imperfect as that work was—if we had just objectively, no hyperbole whatsoever, wrote down on a note card what was going on right now and that the president of the U.S. were doing it, mainstream Republican and Democrats and conservatives and liberal lawmakers everywhere would be saying, You’re being hysterical. Those are not the actions of an American president in the modern U.S. America dominated global world order. Those are the actions of a tin pot dictator somewhere else on the planet. Not here, not in the land of the free. You’re being ridiculous. We know that can’t happen here, definitely not in the twenty-first century.
There is no way that that wouldn’t be resoundingly said across the board. And we just have to live up to the fact that we are currently choking really hard on that reality that, I’m sorry, it has happened here. And it’s only three months in, so I can only see it getting worse.
Sargent: Swin, it’s always terrific to talk to you. Folks, if you enjoyed this … Or maybe enjoyed isn’t the right word, but if you found it illuminating, make sure to check out his writings over at rollingstone.com. Swin, thanks again for coming on with us, man. It’s always great to talk to you.
Suebsaeng: Anytime, dude.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
