Letters from an American - April 17, 2025

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

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April 17th, 2025. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat of Maryland, posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious Seacot prison in El Salvador through administrative error, but can't get back, and wrote, I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight, I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love.

I look forward to providing a full update upon my return. While the president of El Salvador, Naib Buckeli, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Buckeli's previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis

of a man legally in the US having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Buckely might be reassessing the distribution of power in the US. According to Robert Jimmison of the New York Times who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered, well I'm not involved. You'll have to speak to the lawyers, the Department of Justice. Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration's attempt to stop Judge Paula Sinise's order

that it take all available steps to bring Abrego Garcia back to the US as soon as possible. Conservative Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Sinise. We shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court's recent decision," he wrote. Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration.

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter," he wrote. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government 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 claims in essence that because it is 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. The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13, perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.

Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote, If today the executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that. And what assurance shall there be that the executive

will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, he wrote. And the executive's obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed would lose its meaning. After Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's warning yesterday that Trump tariffs will

have significantly larger than anticipated economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth, and his statement that the Fed would not cut interest rates immediately as it assesses the situation, Trump today began attacking Powell. Trump wrote on his social media site that Powell is always too late and wrong. His missive concluded, Powell's termination cannot come fast enough.

Firing Powell would inject yet more chaos into the economy, and the White House told reporters that Trump's post should not be seen as a threat to fire Powell. Hedge Fund founder Spencer Hakimian posted, Clean up of orange vomit on aisle three. There seems to be a change in the air. Three days ago, on April 14th, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former Neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of the bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk and commented,

"'Where does the abolish ICE movement go to get its apology?' Today in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called a multi-front assault to make Earth the playground for ruthless men to work together. He called for a comprehensive national civic uprising that would first stop Trump

and then create a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism, one that offers a positive vision. Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that this is what America needs right now. But a conservative like Brooks, not only arguing that Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life, but then quoting Karl Marx's communist manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles, we have nothing to lose but our chains, signals that a shift is underway.

That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Brett Stevens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today's non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said, my feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Marianas Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done of which I approve is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful, and bad.

Not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement. Stevens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance's bullying of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy, he said. Stevens also noted the meeting had delighted Russia's president Vladimir Putin, who is now emboldened to press the war harder.

We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before. In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders' slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West.

The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the Southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the slave power would own the country. Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other

over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements, and even over the institution of slavery, came together to stand against the end of American democracy. Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas together to stand against the end of American democracy. Four years later, in 1858, Democrats Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members

didn't agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas should remember that he took us by surprise, astounded us by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned, and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose, each fighting,

grasping whatever he could first reach, a scythe, a pitchfork, a chopping-axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound, and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be passed, he shall find us still Americans, no less devoted to the continued union and the prosperity of the country than heretofore. ["Dead in Massachusetts"] Letters from an American was written and read

by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. ["Dead in Massachusetts"] by Michael Moss.