Rapist to Exile Americans Who Commit Rape Like He Did
First they came for oh, wait, no, it's our turn already
Apr. 15: Trump says he’ll unconstitutionally send Americans to El Salvadoran prisons … Credulous media for more than a week have treated seriously Trump’s putative uncertainty about the definite illegality of exiling Americans … Democrats defend deported El Salvadoran but largely silent after a week of Trump contemplating exiling Americans … EXCLUSIVE: DHS memo on detained Tufts student matches right-wing “profile” of her …
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Pres. Donald Trump yesterday was caught on camera saying something he’s been too chickenshit to say publicly because he knows we outnumber him 350 million to one. But when he realized the media were paying attention to him, he did just what Roy Cohn1 taught him and doubled down.
“Homegrowns are next,” he said. The president of the United States was talking about sending Americans to prison in El Salvador. Like, for real.
He was speaking in hushed tones to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as they prepared to meet with media. When Trump saw that the media were listening, he repeated some of his remarks. The New York Post, um, posted a transcript of what they could make out:
Trump: They love you. They love what you do.
[Inaudible]
Trump: Home-grown criminals next.
Bukele: Yeah.
Trump [turning to media]: I said, “homegrowns are next.” The homegrowns. [To Bukele] You gotta build about five more places. [Off-camera laughter].
Bukele: Yeah.
[Inaudible]
Trump: I don’t know2. It’s not big enough.
And while (not enough) people freaked out at what was caught on the hot mic, after Trump realized he’d been caught grossly saying what he grossly said, he himself raised the issue in the Q&A with the media, when asked about sending deportees to El Salvador’s prisons:
Trump: They're great facilities, very strong facilities and they don't play games. I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I said it to [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi]. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, OK?
[Crosstalk]
Q: …and do you think more presidents should follow suit like you guys, as far as taking a hard stance on crime here in the United States?
Let the record show that there is a special place in El Salvador literal Hell for “journalists” whose response to a pre-confession of presidential crimes is to ask whether more presidents should commit those crimes.
Trump: …you have liberty and you have to have liberty, but to have liberty, not everybody is going to be good. And some are bad because they're sick, they're mentally deranged, they're bad. And you have to take them — if you're going to have a country, you're going to have to take those people out…
Got it? To have liberty, to have a country, you have to violate the Constitution. Which is what defines the country and safeguards liberty.
And citizenship? Remember, these are the guys who want ways to strip the citizenship of people they don’t like. And Trump yesterday confirmed just how tiny a poop he’s able to force out about your personal citizenship (italics added for malice aforethought):
Q: You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens, or criminals to El Salvador.
Trump: Love it.
Q: Does that include potentially U.S. citizens, fully naturalized Americans?
Trump: If they're criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head, that happened to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn, yeah, yeah, that includes them. Why, do you think they're a special category of person? They're as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones, too. And I'm all for it, because we can do things with the president [Bukele] for less money and have great security.
Historians may recall that on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump swore to uphold the Constitution. Which says that, yeah, actually, citizens are a special category of person.
Historians may also recall that in 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse that the judge said fits common meanings of the word “rape.”
And despite the fuss over the hot mic, there actually was a slip here. Trump said he told Bondi he doesn’t know what the laws are. But…
…as The New Republic’s Matt Ford reminds us, this issue has already come up.
In fact, it was yet another “reporter,” on April 6, who asked Trump — without a whiff of the inherent unconstitutionality — about Bukele’s offer to take in American citizens. Like…us. Here’s the exchange:
Q: …the president there [Bukele] said he would be willing to take American citizens in the federal prison population, is that one of the ideas you're gonna be discussing?
Trump: Well, I love that. If we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways, and that hit people over the back of the head, and that purposely run people over in cars, uh, if he would take them, I'd be honored to give 'em. I don't know what the law says on that, but I can't imagine the law would say anything different.
If they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I'm all for it, but I'd only do according to the law. But I have suggested that, you know, why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? We have some horrible criminals, American-grown and born.
Weirdly enough, the law is not defined by Trump’s ability to image whether it would say anything different. But what does Trump mean when he says he’d only do it according to the law? Well, look at what he said later with his stupid face:
…if we have somebody that bops an old woman over the head, and we have somebody that is in jail 20 times and goes back and shoots people all over the place and then has a bad judge or a bad prosecutor that do nothing about them — all they worry about is politics and don't worry about that — I think if we could get El Salvador or somebody to take them, I'd be very happy with it, but I have to see what the law says.
The law is what “bad” judges say! But in the same fetid breath in which Trump claims he’ll follow the law, he says he’ll — unconstitutionally — simply override judicial orders and exile Americans.
And as for not knowing yesterday what the law is, Trump also said on April 6 that he doesn’t know what the law is. Two days later, on April 8, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had discussed the idea privately, too — thanks, reporter who asked him about it! — and that Trump “said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that — he’s not sure, we are not sure if there is — it’s an idea that he has simply floated…”
And then, yesterday, as Trump said, “I said it to Pam: ‘I don't know what the laws are.’”
They’ve now had nine days to figure out this Intro to Constitutional Law 101 quiz question. The White House has its own lawyers and also access to the entire literal Department of Justice which only does law things.
And yet, still, we’re supposed to believe, just hasn’t quite cracked the constitutional equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem to figure out the tricky not-tricky legal question of whether the president can do something no other president has ever done, that the Constitution makes no provision for him to do, and that would violate pretty much the entire Constitution’s worth of rights — plus amendments — to which all citizens and all people here are entitled.
Because you can’t have constitutional rights if you’re not here.
And apparently Bondi — the nation’s top law-enforcement official — isn’t about to spoil the surprise and tell Trump it’s not legal. So now we’ve had a week-plus of unpushed-back conversation premised on the non-existent but now-being-established uncertainty about a basic legal precept.
And, keep in mind — despite having more than a week to do all this complicated law-book-readin’ an’ such — when Trump thought he was off-mic, he didn’t feed Bukele any of his “who knows what up, gotta research the law, don’tcha know” horseshit. He just said homegrowns are next.
Um, Have Democratic Leaders Already Been Exiled Because I CAN’T HEAR THEM
Here’s the Senate Democratic media page. No mention of Pres. Donald Trump planning to send American citizens to El Salvador prisons.
The last release from House Democrats was last week. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) at least has a statement about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran non-criminal non-gang member illegally deported back to El Salvador. The Trump marketing department’s prototype who’s beta-testing Trump’s exile regimen.
But nothing your looking-for-it TFN could find about the 350 million Americans now eligible to join Garcia.
Same thing for other Democrats who opposed Garcia’s continued imprisonment.
And this would be a very good time to signal vigorous opposition to this plan that he’s been publicly rolling out for a week now. A splendid time, in fact, to remind Trump that the legality and constitutionality of exiling Americans is less open than the U.S. border.
Exile ain’t in the law. It ain’t in the Constitution. And it is in judicial precedent — as a thing that ain’t in the law or the Constitution.
This might also be a good time to remind Trump that he praised Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for his unlawful campaign against alleged criminals. And that Duterte was arrested for it last month.
And it’s never not a great time for congressional Democrats to get administration officials in the military and law enforcement on the record as unwilling to cooperate in the unlawful, forcible transfer of American citizens out of their country.
Trump has committed at least 42 impeachable offenses since his unconstitutional re-inauguration but only Rep. Al Green (D-TX) has promised articles of impeachment for any of it. The entire Trump administration needs a sharp reminder every day that crimes committed today will be prosecuted under the next Democratic president — which is a good way of helping to ensure there’ll be one.
And it’s definitely a great time for every Democrat to get out there and remind everyone that Saturday is the next National Day of Action.
How come? Because congressional Republicans can still check Trump. And they’re more likely to do so if they think failing to will cost them their jobs.
And after just three months of Trump in the White House, congressional Republicans are reportedly already terrified they’re gonna drown in a 2026 blue wave like Florida’s gonna drown from the rising Atlantic and Gulf of Mexifuckingco.
But Democrats have to push them. And right now only a handful are. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have gone to swing districts to ratchet up the pressure and led Sanders’s biggest rally ever Saturday, drawing 36,000 people. Now they’re hitting red states like Idaho and Montana. And getting cheers in Ufuckingtah.
Other Democrats are holding rallies, too, but why aren’t all? As I argued on last night’s Nicole Sandler Show, what the fuck else do they have to do that’s more important?
One Quickie
An essential element of Pres. Donald Trump’s ambitions to assert presidential authority at the cost of our constitutional rights is to make clownshit claims that supposedly justify extreme measures and exceptions to limits on presidential power. And when government officials won’t provide that false info, Trump will get it elsewhere. I revealed over the weekend that Trump got his Venezuelan bullshit — which would (if true) allow him to deport “foreign” “hostiles” — from a right-wing Tea Party veteran and his group of unnamed “former officials” from the U.S. and Venezuela. Well, yesterday, I also reported that the information the Dept. of Homeland Security came up with about the Turkish Tufts student they snatched came from in some instances word-for-fucking-word from a right-wing website with shadowy right-wing backers.
TCB
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) still have appearances in California and Montana as part of their Fighting Oligarchy tour.
More upcoming events/actions:
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Saturday, April 19: National Day of Action.
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Go get ‘em, kids! We outnumber them by a lot…
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
It’s worth watching The Apprentice (the movie) if you haven’t already.
This might’ve been Bukele. Not sure. Sorry.
and that purposely run people over in cars
Unless, oh course, they are running over people who are protesting him. In that case, they are rewarded.
He seems obsessed with “hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking”. Is there something he’s not telling us about Ivana’s death?