Just for the ugly standards of this administration, the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego García stands out.
A migrant worker and Salvadoran metal in Maryland with no criminal record rather than traffic and illegal entry to the country, was arrested by the immigration authorities in March and deported to one of the famous prisons of his house. The government recognized the “administrative error”, an Orwellian euphemism for a Kafkaesca nightmare, but asked the United States Supreme Court to revoke a federal judge to require its return on Monday. The same day, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the order of the lower court so that it can have time in the case of the case.
Abrego García was an unimportant person when he was deported, except, of course, his wife, his son and two steps. He is the issue of an accusation that he belonged to the MS-13 gang, but there is only weak evidence and no evidence. The entire American justice building is based on the conviction that there is no fault without evidence beyond reasonable doubt, and that there is no unimportant person, at least not in the eye of the law.
I am thinking in this case as an emblem or everything that makes Trump’s presidency so vile and destructive, just when I am late to give him the benefit of the doubt, and when I have been with him or the year or experiment. I have, to borrow a line of Peggy Noonan, a “a certain idea of America.” Hey, right?
A democratic nobility
What is that “a certain idea”? It has to do with a type of democratic nobility, something that most of us can recognize the moment we see it. It is the truth sojourner by asking the votes at the Women’s Rights Convention of 1851 in Akron, Ohio, “amn’t I a woman?” It is Lou Gehrig, affected as in his thirty years, calling himself “the most fortunate man in the face of the earth.”
It is Gail Halvorsen, the sweets bomber of the Berlin Air Bridge, in parachute and gum to the hungry children of the besieged city. It is John McCain by rejecting a respondent to other American prisoners of war in the Norvietnamese captivity, and, 40 years later, publicly rebuking a supporter for calling Barack Obama, his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, “an Arabic.”
It is Robert F. Kennedy after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.: “What we need in the United States is not the division; what we need in the United States is not a hatred of George Hw Bush after the victory of Rayo in the Gulf War:” This is not a moment of euphoria, it is certainly not a time to joke. “
The democratic nobility is also on a page that keeps in my Drower desktop, a manifest passerby of the ship that took my 10-year-old mother to the United States, thanks to the law of displaced persons of 1948. Just below my mother and nationality, “” “-“-“Jordan; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; and Gerda Nesselroth, 45, also appeals.
They will soon be American.
What is American here?
To what this is reduced is the self -control and compassion of the temporarily powerful, the respect and absence of self -pity of the temporarily weak, and the shared conviction that strong and weak are united in a common democratic creed. It is what people used to admire our national character, mythologized to some extent, but based on something real: underestimation and trust, decency and expectation, America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
This is what feels so totally absent today. It is expected that those of us who have as coastal elites will be deferential with the “real America” that this administration chose, one that is supposedly more in tune with the spirit of the country than the Set of Vineyard de Martha. Well, please educate us.
But I have trouble understanding what is real in the political beliefs that change JD Vance or Trump’s memes coins. I do not see what is American by denying due process to someone like Abrego García, or by repeatedly threatening our neighbors and allies with cancellations of treaties and possible conquests, or in moody cavalry, reflecting an unconstitutional for the benefit of benefit in the protection of the benefit in the benefit in the depth and the benefit of the protection of national security officers and national security officers and national security officers. Be unfair. I do not understand the connection between making the United States again that the symbol of American greatness knows as Wall Street, all in the name of a ruinous obsession and economic and diplomatic illiterate and commercial deficits.
The United States is a fast and diverse country and an ancient and resistant democracy that quickly won authoritarianism and illiberalism as Russia or Hungary did. The habits of freedom, of 250 years, are still deep in our bones, deeper than anything that this president can ruin in the coming years. But that certain idea of the United States that once typified us, and for which we were so admired, is evaporating.
Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist.
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