The Supreme Court Ruled, So He Swiped Right On a Dictator

In what historians will likely catalog under “Things We Tried Pretending Were Legal,” President Donald Trump, in coordination with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, held a livestreamed Oval Office meeting where they giggled through a discussion about defying the Supreme Court and permanently detaining a U.S. resident. Just locker room war crimes, fellas.

Who's Nayib Bukele: The ‘Cool Dictator’ Redefining Authoritarian Chic

In the shimmering pantheon of 21st-century strongmen, Nayib Bukele has found a way to stand out: by pairing Ray-Bans with repression and Instagram filters with indefinite detention. He’s the President of El Salvador, but also, amusingly, the self-declared “CEO of Democracy, Inc.” He’s here to clean up crime, bulldoze corruption, and casually assassinate due process because it clashes with his Instagram palette.

Bukele’s power-grab isn’t subtle. He didn’t even try. In fact, in 2021, he literally updated his Twitter bio to “Dictator of El Salvador”. When international backlash followed, he called it a joke—because nothing says “satire” like storming the legislature with armed troops because they wouldn’t approve your security budget.

He then cleared out the Constitutional Court like it was last season’s wardrobe, replacing justices with political yes-men faster than you can say “checks and balances are cringe.” One minute, he’s dancing on TikTok. The next, he’s rewriting the rules of re-election. Democracy, Bukele-style, is just authoritarianism with better lighting.

Enter CECOT, Bukele’s megaplex prison for alleged gang members and anyone who gave him side-eye during brunch. It’s a concrete cathedral to law-and-order performance art, complete with mass arrests, trial-less detentions, and viral videos of shoeless inmates crouching in formation like a dystopian boy band.

Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have raised every alarm bell. But Bukele waves them off like a pop-up ad, insisting that his war on crime is “working.” And sure—it is, if you count mass incarceration without oversight as success. It’s like building a house out of body cams and calling it justice.

Meanwhile, journalists in El Salvador are doing what journalists do: asking questions and getting punished for it. Investigative outlets like El Faro have been targeted by surveillance software, slapped with bogus tax charges, and smeared as enemy collaborators. Bukele doesn’t hate the press—he just wants it to shut up and repost his memes without asking what’s in the basement of CECOT.

What makes Bukele truly dangerous isn’t just what he’s doing—it’s how he aims to look cool doing it. He livestreams oppression. He hashtags authoritarianism. And he’s given a generation of would-be autocrats a new blueprint: dress sharp, smile for the cameras, and erode institutions so gradually your followers think it’s a rebrand.

The New Yorker put it bluntly: Bukele is popular. Hugely popular. And in a world that increasingly trades freedom for vibe curation, popularity can become the excuse for erasing constitutional guardrails.

So, of course, he's Trump's new bestie

Tyrant Dialed: Trump Skips Court Compliance, Rings Bukele to Bury a Citizen

So picture yesterday's Oval Office meeting. Two men with a complex—playing geopolitics like it’s an underfunded school play version of Austin Powers. They weren’t channeling world leaders so much as two middle-aged mall Santas auditioning to be Dr. Evil. And all because the Constitution had the audacity to suggest they couldn’t disappear an American citizen like a half-used Happy Meal toy.

Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel noted that the entire meeting was a rehearsal in shamelessness, with key officials spouting lies not under oath, but on camera, as if filmed propaganda was a substitute for jurisprudence.

But the irony doesn’t stop at the stream. As Wheeler points out, Trump’s administration is claiming Kilmar Abrego Garcia is too dangerous to release—but somehow not too dangerous to let go. In a twist even Kafka would reject for being too obvious, the same government that insists Abrego is a threat also refused to charge him with anything. Not once. Not ever. Their logic? He’s just dangerous enough to imprison without trial, but not so dangerous they’d need to prove it in court.

But here's the kicker: the lie wasn’t just about optics—it was used to argue that the U.S. government is no longer responsible for Abrego Garcia, because he’s now “in the custody of El Salvador.” This custody, Wheeler argues, is deliberately contrived—part of a coordinated scheme in which Trump and Bukele pretend neither of them can act, while laughing about the setup on livestream. It’s not a diplomatic disagreement; it’s a ping-pong match of abdication dressed up in national flags.

Smoke, Mirrors, and a Missing Citizen: The Constitutional Vanishing Act

Wheeler’s analysis underscores that this isn’t confusion or error—it’s calculated fiction. A smoke screen constructed from bad-faith legal interpretations, performative pressers, and lies submitted as filings. Because if both countries pretend they’re powerless, accountability disappears like a habeas corpus in a disappearing ink stunt.

As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, the Trump administration’s behavior isn’t about miscommunication—it’s performance art with constitutional stakes. The game is rhetorical: Trump pretends he lacks the power to demand Abrego Garcia’s return. Bukele pretends he lacks the power to send him back. And the U.S. legal system? It’s the unwitting audience clapping at the sleight of hand, even as its pockets are being picked.

This isn’t legal ambiguity; it’s a carefully coordinated illusion designed to hide plain truth behind diplomatic fog. Serwer calls it “an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.” These aren’t rogue actors; they’re a team running a con. One country shrugs, the other sighs, and somewhere in the middle, a man disappears from the protection of both.

The administration had choices: pursue charges, follow due process, let the courts decide. They chose the opposite—manufacture a state of helplessness while orchestrating every stage cue behind the curtain. Because in this new doctrine, law doesn’t constrain power—it obscures it. Sovereignty becomes the magic word you say when you want accountability to vanish.

Don’t Worry, It Gets Dumber

Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi all laughed on cue while Trump whispered about building more facilities for “homegrown criminals.” You know, Americans. The kind you can deport retroactively if they become inconvenient. Bukele, ever the eager partner, agreed he had "space." It's unclear whether he meant a jail cell or just emotional availability for authoritarian cosplay.

The White House later insisted the president has full control of foreign affairs, a constitutional interpretation that somehow skips both Congress and humanity. Meanwhile, Bukele claimed he couldn’t release Abrego Garcia because he's a terrorist—a claim the courts, facts, and basic logic disagree with. Minor detail.

Straight-Faced Hypocrisy in Real Time

Judge Paula Xinis had previously ruled Abrego Garcia's detention was “wholly lawless.” The Supreme Court agreed. In response, Trump and team simply said the Supreme Court was wrong. Not in court. Not with legal briefs. But on livestream. With vibes.

Trump's advisor Stephen Miller told the press (and, hilariously, the Supreme Court via filing) that the Court ruled "9–0 in our favor," a statement as true as Miller’s hairline is natural. Legal analysts were quick to label it propaganda, which is somehow still not a disqualifier for filing briefs.

Empty Wheel further noted the administration's contradictory logic: if Abrego Garcia is truly a threat, why was he handed to a foreign government the U.S. claims has no legal recourse to extradite or control him? If he's not a threat, then what justifies the legal acrobatics? Trump’s team insists both that they cannot return him and that he was too dangerous to remain—an Orwellian paradox where legal limbo is a policy goal.

Here’s why this matters, even if your empathy hard drive is corrupted:

If they can disappear a legal U.S. resident into a legal fiction of foreign custody, they can do it to you. You. The reader. The citizen. The white guy living in Ohio who thinks this will never touch him because he owns a grill, or pays his taxes on time. Authoritarianism isn’t punctual. It just keeps knocking.

Scholar Timothy Snyder laid it bare: the White House’s doctrine now mimics Nazi statelessness policies—removing legal protections, then pretending you never had them. The only difference is, the Nazis didn’t film their war crimes for likes.

Diplomacy by Detention

On social media, Trump described foreign leaders as “brilliant” for ridding themselves of the “nonproductive,” the “murderers,” and the merely inconvenient. It’s not genocide if you outsource the paperwork, right?

In an August 2024 chat with Elon Musk on his private misinformation trampoline (formerly Twitter, now just X, like a straight-to-DVD Wolverine reboot), Trump laid it out plainly: the plan isn’t immigration control—it’s human disposal with plausible deniability. Praising what he called the “brilliant” strategy of leaders exporting the “bad” and “nonproductive,” Trump explained that other countries were purging not just criminals, but the poor, the tired, the hungry—basically the Statue of Liberty’s entire clientele.

“They’re not workers, or they don’t want to work,” he said, echoing a worldview where human value is pegged to productivity like a poorly indexed stock. The logic is chilling in its simplicity: export the burden, dodge the blame, and call it border policy.

Historian Timothy Snyder doesn't mince words. Under this doctrine, he warned, the U.S. government has positioned itself to legitimize extrajudicial executions as long as they happen just outside the legal zip code. “If they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal,” Snyder noted, “because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” It’s not policy. It’s passport-enabled nihilism.

Snyder drew a direct line to the Nazi-era tactic of forced statelessness, where individuals were stripped of nationality not for what they’d done, but so they could be disappeared without consequence. Once a person no longer has a country, they no longer have rights. Once no one claims them, no one has to count them. And Trump, between Musk memes and birthday parades, seems perfectly happy to be the one holding the eraser.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the state Abrego Garcia was abducted from and one of the few patriots still attempting to tether reality to consequence, demanded Abrego Garcia’s release and warned he’ll fly to El Salvador if needed. Meanwhile, the administration built a policy where due process is something you lose in transit.

Conclusion: We Are Not Okay

This isn’t foreign policy. It’s international rendition wrapped in a birthday party press release. It’s a ghost of a republic performing itself on cable news reruns. Abrego Garcia sits illegally detained. The courts are lied to. And a regime plays fascist charades while Americans scroll past.

Due process isn’t optional. And neither is your silence. Resist.

Sources:
- Empty Wheel: https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/04/15/why-did-donald-trump-free-someone-he-purports-to-be-a-dangerous-terrorist/
- The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/bukele-trump-court-order/682432/
- Law Dork: https://www.lawdork.com/p/trump-supreme-court-abrego-garcia
- NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/trump-abrego-garcia-court-ruling