Even according to the ugly standards of this administration, the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia stands out.
A Salvadoral Migrant and a metal worker in Maryland without a criminal record other than traffic offenses and illegal entry into the country, he was arrested by the immigration authorities in March and expelled to one of the notorious prisons of his homeland, in violation of the order of an American immigration judge. The government recognized “administrative error” – an orwellian and Kafkaesque nightmare and asked the United States Supreme Court to cancel the ordinance of a federal judge demanding his return on Monday. On the same day, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the order of the lower court so that it can have time to consider the case.
Abrego Garcia was an unimportant person when he was expelled – except, of course, to his wife and his son and two Beaux -Children. He was the subject of an accusation that it belonged to the Gang MS -13 – but there is only fragile evidence and no evidence. The entire building of American justice is built on the conviction that there is no guilt without proof out of any reasonable doubt – and that there is no unimportant person, at least not in the eyes of the law.
I considered this affair as an emblem of everything that makes the presidency of Donald Trump so vile and destructive, even when I looked back to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even when I agree with him on this point or this point of politics. To borrow a line from Peggy Noonan, a “certain idea of America”. He’s not it.
A democratic nobility
What is this “certain idea”? This has to do with a type of democratic nobility, which most of us can recognize the moment we see it. It is the truth anxious to ask suffragists of the Women’s Rights Convention from 1851 to Akron, Ohio, “Isn’t that a woman?” It is Lou Gehrig, struck by SLA in the thirties, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth”.
It’s Gail Halvorsen, the Berlin Air Transport Bombardier, Parachuting Chocolates and Gum to hungry children from the besieged city. It is John McCain refusing an offer to be published in front of other American prisoners of War in North Vietnamese captivity-and, 40 years later, publicly re-exchanges a supporter for having called Barack Obama, his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, “An Arab”.
It is Robert F. Kennedy after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: “What we need in the United States is not a division; What we need in the United States is not hatred; What we need in the United States is not violence and anarchy; But it is love and wisdom, and compassion for each other. ” It’s George HW Bush after the Lightning Victory in the Gulf War: “It is not a period of euphoria, certainly not the time to rejoice.”
The democratic nobility is also on a page that I keep in my office drawer, a passenger manifesto of the ship which brought my 10 -year -old mother to the United States, thanks to the law on displaced people from 1948. Just below the name and nationality of my mother – “stateless” – there is Jamil Issa Hasan, 26, Jordanian; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; And Gerda Nesselroth, 45, also stateless.
Soon to be Americans all.
What is the American here?
All of this comes down to the self-revenue and the compassion of temporarily powerful, self-respect and the absence of oneself of temporarily weak, and the shared and weak conviction are united in a common democratic belief. This is what people admired about our national character – mythologized to a certain extent, but based on something real: euphemism and confidence, decency and waiting, America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
This is what seems so absent today. Those of us who consider as coastal elites should be deferential to “true America” which has elected this administration – that which is supposed to be more in tune with the spirit of the country than the entire Martha vineyard. Very well, please educate us.
But I find it hard to understand what is real in political beliefs that change JD Vance or Trump coins. I do not see what is American by refusing regular procedure to someone like Abrego Garcia, or by repeatedly threatening our neighbors and allies with cancellations of treaties and a possible conquest, or by reflecting on an unconstitutional term, or by taking advantage of a political bureau, or in an arbitrarily dismissal of military officers and national security officials because a conspiracy conspiracy is in dismissal. I do not know the link between making America again great while tanning this symbol of American grandeur known as Wall Street – all in the name of an economically illiterate and diplomaticly ruinous obsession for prices and commercial deficits.
The United States is a vast and diversified country and an ancient and resilient democracy which will not fall back quickly in authoritarianism and illiberalism as did Russia or Hungary. The 250 -year -old -year -olds, is always deep in our bones, deeper than anything that this president can ruin in the coming years. But this certain idea of America which characterized us, and for which we were once so admired, evaporates.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for the New York Times.
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