We’ve Officially Entered the Next Phase of Trump’s Dictatorship Era
18th March 2025
Slate, a Voice of the Crust.
The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.
Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)
Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of “Article II authority” to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due process—and as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.
So, We can see here the fully developed Narrative that the proglodyte media will be pushing until Trump leaves office four years from now. None of what Trump is doing differs at all from what Biden or Obama did as President, except that their judges didn’t pretend to have the power to interfere with their activities (because why would they?). Tossing around terms like ‘autocracy’ and ‘monarchy’ are merely attempts to stir up the mob, and have no significance other than to demonstrate that the writer doesn’t know what those terms actually mean. The ‘neutral principles’ espoused by Trump are quite clear to those who don’t have their Progressive Goggles on: (a) the President has plenary power in foreign affairs and doesn’t answer to the judiciary in that area, which has a long and consistent history in the law (vide the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, which the courts allowed), and (b) employees in the Executive branch work for the President and can be taken on or dumped as he sees fit, so long as he follows the Constitutional and statutory requirements, which so far he has. Every time he makes a move, he states clearly the authority on which that move is based, which the Narrative Media invariably ignore and don’t address, being too busy mouthing things like ‘autocracy’ and ‘monarchy’ for their NPC followers.