Trump, Who Swore Oath to Protect & Defend Constitution, Now Says He Isn’t So Sure

Welker then pointed to the Fifth Amendment, which establishes a right to trial by jury and due process. Trump shrugged it off as an inconvenience to his mass deportation operation: “It might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials,” he said, further arguing that the U.S. has “some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth, and I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.” 

This, of course, is the endgame of years of violent right-wing xenophobia: a society in which dehumanizing panics about imagined, scary immigrant hordes justify the total decimation of all of our most basic rights. After all, Trump has said repeatedly that he plans to start deporting citizens to CECOT, too.

“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?” Welker finally asked Trump. This shouldn’t even be a question. On Inauguration Day, Trump swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” But having seemingly forgotten this, he replied, “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.” His lawyers, he claimed, “have a different interpretation” of the Supreme Court’s order that he return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. That, naturally, means his administration will not “obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

The entire interview was a dizzying and predictably insulting display of propaganda, as Trump seemingly maintained that Joe Biden is still shadow-president—that is, the president who’s responsible for all the bad things that are happening right now, while Trump is the president responsible for all the good things. As Trump put it, when asked about his failed promises to fix inflation and the economy writ large on day one: “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy because he’s done a terrible job.”

At other points, Trump assured us he’s simply been trolling on his stated plans to run for a third term, even as he’s previously assured us that he’s not trolling; he justified the massive costs of his forthcoming dictator-esque, birthday military parade on June 14; he reiterated that little 15-year-old (??) girls don’t need dolls; and that he’s winning the trade war he started with China that is currently making the costs of everything surge. 

So, that’s all great! If anyone has ideas about what we’re supposed to do with all of this… let me know!!!

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