Transcript: Fiasco for Trump as Judge Threatens Contempt amid Poll Dip
A lot of people are really scared, honestly, that something has happened to him, that that’s why he’s not being made available to people at the same time as we have Republicans going to that prison and posing for selfies—much as Kristi Noem, the DHS head, did in that horrible, horrible video. It’s telling that they are getting access to the prison to engage in that kind of propaganda, and the senator, when he just wants to know if this constituent is well, is being shut down.
Sargent: Yeah. Just to clarify for people, Abrego Garcia was picked up in Prince George’s County, Maryland. That’s the suburb just outside D.C. in Maryland, and that’s what it means to say that he’s Van Hollen’s constituent. I want to add here that when the the Salvadoran official told Senator Van Hollen that, Oh, the Trump administration is just paying us to do this, he actually accidentally admitted how weak the Trump administration’s position really is. The Trump folks are just going through this show of saying, Well, look, Bukele is just telling us he’s not going to release him and so we can’t do anything either. So essentially, the Salvadoran official admitted there that this is all at the pleasure of Donald Trump, which is the whole point of it all. Bukele—one dictator doing another dictator a solid—is holding him so that Trump doesn’t have to give him due process and [deal with] all the awful press that would result from that.
Gira Grant: We can’t forget, just a couple of days ago, Bukele pushing back on the idea that he could return Abrego Garcia, saying, What am I supposed to do? Smuggle him into the United States? and telling press that the question they were asking him was “preposterous.” “We’re not fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” Bukele said. It’s theater up and down. I don’t know how much stock to put in where the vice president might be breaking from the president of El Salvador; I am not an expert on their internal politics. But just to have an American senator also delivering that news, I think, is really important right now.
