Opinion: Ignoring laws and courts, Trump crosses a legal Rubicon

President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order as young people show copies of the executive order they signed at an teaching event in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March Photo by Ben Curtis Associated Press April is the cruelest month because that s when the rule of law definitively collapsed I don t mean that criminal gangs now run riot and law-abiding citizens cower behind bushes For the bulk part police maintain order and life goes on as usual But at the same time the Trump administration has crossed the Rubicon and they rule America not as a rule-based democracy but an autocracy Of module the majority obvious and the majority of egregious examples of the Trump administration s lawlessness would be the deportation of more than people without a shred of due process to El Salvador s Terrorism Confinement Center one of the greater part brutal prisons in existence Despite admitting that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador through an administrative error he continues to languish in El Salvador even though the Supreme Court has explained the cabinet must facilitate his return The opinion by the Fourth Circuit of Appeals authored by Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III perfectly sums how far the Trump administration has strayed from America s fundamental values The establishment is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order Further it contends in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done This should be shocking not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear If in contemporary times the Executive suggests the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders what assurance will there be in the next 24 hours that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies Judge Wilkinson is neither alarmist nor exaggerating Trump revealed that his administration is looking at how to deport homegrowns to El Salvador he even suggested they should build five more prisons And one Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka floated the notion that supporting Abrego Garcia is prosecutable because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute Anyone protesting the Trump administration s mistakenly deporting Abrego Garcia and then refusing to follow judicial orders could find themselves sharing a cell with this man in a hellish prison Every day it seems brings more examples of Trump s weaponizing regime against his enemies On April Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate two people who defied him Miles Taylor who wrote an anonymous opinion piece in detailing internal resistance to Trump s more bizarre policies and Christopher Krebs the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Precaution Agency who played a major role in debunking Trump s false insists that the vote was rigged Trump s vindictiveness extended to firing the executive director of the Office of Contract Relations at Customs and Demarcation Protection George E Bogden because he is friends with Taylor and attended his wedding The bulk in recent days the FBI arrested Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and Former Do a Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano along with his wife Both are charged with impeding the administration s immigration crackdown Trump also ordered the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue the Democrats main fundraising platform and his campaign against law firms who have somehow offended him continues although a judge struck down the order against Perkins Coie as unconstitutional Outrageous as these examples seem Trump and his legal association precisely gave each a veneer of legality FBI Director Kash Patel for example suggests that Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse Eduardo Flores Ruiz allowing the subject an illegal alien to evade arrest ActBlue ostensibly broke the law by allowing illegal campaign donations Taylor may have improperly disseminated classified information And Trump invokes a statute the Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador Each of these incidents and more has gotten key attention from the news media But two moves in early April did not garner much attention but may be worse because both openly drop the pretense of acting according to law In April Congress passed a bill mandating that TikTok s Chinese owner ByteDance sell the app by Jan or else it will be banned from the United States Trump likes TikTok and so the day after he was inaugurated he signed an executive order pausing the TikTok ban and granting immunity to any company selling the product The original law however contained no provisions for suspending the ban while negotiations proceeded The deadline arrived without any resolution and so on April Trump issued another executive order once more extending the deadline But this time Trump makes explicit that he is not bound to obey any law that he thinks represents an encroachment on the powers of the Executive In other words Trump declares he can ignore any statute passed by Congress if he so desires Then on April Trump issued another executive order this time rescinding Capacity Conservation Plan Definition of Showerhead Fed Reg December At first glance Trump may have a point Surely a word definition of showerhead is overkill As Trump notes the Oxford English Dictionary defines showerhead with one short sentence A perforated nozzle or cap from which the water sprays out in a shower The point of the extended definition was to limit the prospect of limitless water usage in a large number of showerhead products but not having sufficient water pressure annoyed Trump because he claimed he could not properly wash his beautiful hair Retracting a rule that has been in place for years however requires the same extensive process as creating a rule including a reasoned explanation and a notice-and-comment period Trump has no patience for such niceties and so he does away with them And here Trump definitively says the silent part out loud Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal Perhaps because there were fewer practical impediments stopping rulers from doing what they yearned Renaissance writers thought long and hard about what tyranny means and what they came up is a bit surprising They did not define a tyrant as someone who governs unjustly and arbitrarily or maintains power through violence Instead a tyrant rules by will instead of law The main object of a tyrant wrote the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus is to follow his own caprices The Elizabethan political scientist Thomas Starkey appealed what is more repugnant to nature than a whole nation to be governed by the will of a prince For John Locke a legitimate king accepts limits on his power while the tyrant makes all give way to his own will and appetite And that is where we are currently With these two actions Donald Trump has crossed the Rubicon While several of Trump s executive orders have been shot down in court such as suspending birthright citizenship the Supreme Court will hear the circumstance in May and using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people to El Salvador Trump has shown that he can and will ignore the law when it suits him While Trump insists he would never defy the Supreme Court that is not true The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia s return yet he remains in El Salvador When Trump can set aside a law he doesn t like without the slightest resistance from Congress when the justification for rescinding a regulation is because I stated so we are no longer governed by law but by will We now live in a tyranny And if there was any doubt Trump laid them to rest when Kristen Welker questioned on Meet the Press if he was obligated to uphold the Constitution Trump replied notwithstanding the Oath of Office I don t know The only question is how much damage Trump causes before the rule of law is restored If it is restored Peter C Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University He has published books on Shakespeare Milton and the literature of terrorism and essays in Salon Newsweek Inside Higher Ed and Times of San Diego His latest book is Early Modern Others Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature Routledge