A Loophole That Would Swallow the Constitution

Donald Trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.

Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law. His administration has admitted that one such prisoner, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador in error, but insists that it has no recourse. Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty.

Neither Trump nor Bukele bothered to make this absurd conceit appear plausible. Even as Trump and his officials claim that only El Salvador has the power to free wrongfully imprisoned American residents, the United States is paying El Salvador to hold the prisoners. (Naturally, Congress never appropriated such funds; Trump has already seized large swaths of Congress’s constitutionally mandated spending power for himself.) Bukele told reporters, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Trump, not even attempting to maintain the pretense that the two countries were somehow at an impasse, told his counterpart, “You are helping us out, and we appreciate it.”

The play was signaled early on, after a judge ordered Bukele to return prisoners seized without due process. In response, Bukele posted on X, “Oopsie… too late