OK, Chuck Schumer. Trump Just Crossed Your Red Line. Now What?

But Trump won’t do it. The administration argues that only El Salvador has the ability to send Abrego Garcia back. “DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation,” Joseph Mazzara, acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a court filing on Monday. El Salvador’s president, who visited Trump on Monday, also claimed powerlessness. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” he told reporters, cruelly mischaracterizing Abrego Garcia. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” (This is all laughable given the recent repatriation of alleged rapists and MAGA diehards Andrew and Tristan Tate from Romania.)

Despite Trump’s kindergarten-level reasoning, it’s clear as day that he’s defying the Supreme Court’s unanimous order. It is also predictable—and, in fact, was predicted. For months, it has been apparent to grassroots Democrats that Trump was pushing us rapidly toward authoritarianism. For months, we have been asking, pleading, shouting, and raging at the leaders of our party to start acting like our democracy is already at risk, because it very clearly has been. And for months, leaders of our party, including Schumer, have directed Democrats to lie low and hold their fire, clinging to the empirically incorrect fantasy that we’re not yet in a break-the-glass democratic emergency.

It’s been a shameful abdication of leadership by Democratic elites. But there was still an opportunity for redemption. Schumer said that if Trump defied a Supreme Court order, then there’d be no choice but to “take extraordinary action.” Presumably he has been preparing for this possibility—not doing so would be almost inconceivable Democratic malpractice.