The two tipping points for when we officially become a dictatorship could occur this week

Friends,

I wouldn’t intrude on your day for a second time if this weren’t deadly serious.

The Trump regime is on the cusp of a showdown with the Supreme Court. Depending on what the court does and how the regime responds, the regime could openly become a dictatorship two ways.

1. The first way the Trump regime clearly becomes a dictatorship is by directly defying a Supreme Court order.

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump regime to “facilitate” the return from an El Salvador prison of a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego García, whom the administration admitted it mistakenly deported there (given a court order specifically banning his deportation to El Salvador because of the possibility he faced torture from the government there if returned).

Trump officials said Sunday that the Supreme Court’s ruling requires only that the Trump regime allows García to return —and only if he’s released by the government of El Salvador.

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, in a visit to the Oval Office today, said that the idea that he would send García back was “preposterous.”

So, what happens now if the Supreme Court clarifies that the Trump regime must use every means possible to get García back to America, but the regime chooses to defy that order?

JD Vance is a proponent of the view that a president can defy a Supreme Court order. In 2021, when he was running for a Senate seat in Ohio, Vance said that if the courts stopped Trump, he should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

On February 8 of this year, after being sworn in as vice president, Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” (without acknowledging that it’s up to the Supreme Court to determine the extent of a president’s “legitimate power”).

2. The second way we officially become a dictatorship is if the Trump regime can accuse any American citizen of being so dangerous as to justify being sent to a foreign prison, without any independent court review of the regime’s evidence.

If the answer is yes, none of us is safe from the Trump regime.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.

During Bukele’s visit today, Bukele and Trump celebrated their joint crackdown on immigration and gangs. Bukele told Trump: “You have a crime problem and a terrorism problem that you need help with. And we’re a small country, but we can help.”

In response, Trump made clear he’s also considering sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador. “The homegrowns are next,” Trump told Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places. ... It’s not big enough.”

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, argued in a statement accompanying Thursday’s court order that if García can be abducted and handed over to El Salvador, no American citizen is safe: “The Government’s argument … implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

The possibility of arbitrary abduction by a sovereign and imprisonment abroad is one criterion that separates democracies from dictatorships. One of the grievances the founders of the United States listed in the Declaration of Independence was “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

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What does the American public think?

A Reuters/Ipsos poll from late last month showed that 82 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe a president “should obey federal court rulings even if the president does not want to.”

Yet in the same poll, 76 percent of Republicans agreed that “the Trump Administration should continue to deport people they view as a risk despite the court order.”

The poll was completed before the Abrego García case came to public attention, so Republican opinion about presidential obedience to a court order in a case of someone whom the administration admits they erroneously deported remains unclear.

How close do you believe we’re coming to these tipping points?