President Donald Trump is about to finish the first 100 days of his second presidency, and things feel a little more without law than the first time. The first months of the second Trump presidency were marked by the attempts of his administration to force their agenda to the country’s coil, even if it means breaking the founding principles of the nation in the process.
Friday, Time The magazine published an interview with Trump discussing his first 100 days, and the president was not convinced that the United States was a country managed by laws, not by men.
Time The main political correspondent, Eric Cortellesa, and the editor Sam Jacobs, asked the president – who redecorated the oval office to align himself with the garish school signs of his golf clubs and his penthouses – about a portrait he added by John Adams.
Adams once “we are a government governed by laws, not by men,” asked investigators. “Do you agree with that?”
Trump – Who at the start couldn’t even remember where the painting was – was not so sure.
“We are a government led by laws, not by men?” Well, I think we are a government governed by law, but you know, someone has to administer the law, “he replied. “So, therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role there.
Honest men like Trump – who already explore ways to fold the laws to their advantage. Earlier in the interview, Trump teased Time That even if he knew nothing about the possibility of serving a third term, people begged him and he knew options to get there. “There are some shortcomings that have been discussed that are well known. But I do not believe in gaps. I do not believe in the use of gaps,” said Trump, adding that he was “flooded with requests” to serve a third term.
But if Trump wants to say that he does not believe in the exploitation of gaps, the evidence is stacked against him. In particular on immigration issues. The president and his advisers took a lot of trouble to reinterpret aging powers in wartime such as extraterrestrial enemies to carry out mass deportations without regular procedure for migrants, threw hundreds of men in brutal prisons in Salvador without trial or conviction, and challenged the federal courts in every turn.
Asked about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – a man from Maryland who was wrongly deported to the notorious of Cecot prison in Salvador, whose return to the United States, the Trump administration was sentenced to “facilitate” the Supreme Court – the president did not want to talk about it. He said Time that he was not responsible for complying with the orders of the court or making the decision to obtain the return of Abrego Garcia. “I leave that to my lawyers,” he said.
Once pressed, the president added that he had not asked that Salvadoral President Nayib Bukele returns Abrego Garcia because Bukele had “said he would not” and repeated parasitic accusations according to which Abrego Garcia was a member of the violent gang belonging to MS-13.
Trump then said that he was still open to the possibility of expelling American citizens to foreign prisons. “I would love to do it if it was allowed by law. We examine this. When I have a person, it would be extreme cases,” he said. “If you ask me if I would do this or not, I would do it, but totally, and I think you have to leave this part of the sentence completely subject to being authorized under the law.”
Donald Trump occupies the most powerful political bureau in the country and the world. Although John Adams may have said that the United States is a land of laws, it can only take the work and a will of a man to dismantle them.
