Has America Reached the End of the Road?

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

I have to say that the unraveling of American democracy has proceeded far faster than I thought it would: I always assumed concentration camps for Donald Trump’s enemies was somewhere at the end of the road toward American authoritarianism—and it’s always seemed clear that it would be ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, that would be leading the charge.

But I never imagined that not even three months into the administration we’d already be negotiating and debating the precise legal fig leaf necessary for masked state agents to sweep everyday Americans off the streets and disappear them to specially designed torture gulags in Central America without due process for indefinite (and nearly surely permanent) detention.

 And yet here we are.

This coming Saturday, April 19th, will mark the 250^th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord and it’s perhaps darkly fitting that America stands today at one of the three or four great crossroads of our grand experiment in democracy and self-government since.

The existential national crucible that Donald Trump has quickly brought to the fore over the last few weeks with his experiment in disappearing people to a torture gulag in El Salvador presents us with one of the starkest test of values and the constitution our country has ever faced. I’m only moderately optimistic that we will navigate our way past this moment, but let’s be clear: There are two paths out of this crisis—one that preserves the most basic and foundational values and liberties of our country and the other, well, thar be the land of dragons.

There are a couple points that I want to break down and explore in this most pressing of all moments.

First, the stakes here are the highest that they can be. Donald Trump has quite deliberately marched us right up to the fundamental question: Does the Constitution matter? Can checks and balances constrain his vision or is he an untouchable king and dictator-in-the-making?

There’s been a lot of mis-use of language in this case — people keep parroting the Trump administration’s frame of “deporting” people to El Salvador but that’s clearly not what this is. Deportation is a formal process, with guidelines and due process, and one that primarily focuses on removing or returning people to their country of origin. What Trump is doing is closer to the “extraordinary renditions” we saw of accused terrorists post-9/11, but even that awful frame somehow describes something more organized, limited, and arguably humane than what is unfolding right now—and what Trump hopes to grow this into. It’s hard to think that this is anything less than state-sanctioned kidnapping. As I wrote a few weeks ago in the early stages of this crisis, “‘Disappearing’ people isn’t would-be-Orban-level abuse-of-power—this is Pinochet-in-Chile or Jorge Rafael Videla-in-Argentina-level abuse.”

All the news reporting that calls the El Salvador CECOT facility a “prison” is also similarly wrong and under-representing the stakes here. I believe it’s best described as a gulag (as does Jonathan Last), but at the very least we should be calling this a concentration camp. Concentration camps as historically understood are specifically facilities that stand outside normal legal procedures to imprison targeted groups.

(Here’s a little fun fact about concentration camp — there are, presumably, not many: They’re actually the invention of the Spanish, as part of the Ten-Years War, and the British, as part of Boer War.)

Using the right language here would make a great difference in how the US public understands what’s happening. The US press, as has been the case so often with Trump, is not treating this with anything near the five-alarm-fire it should be. Check out the New York Times homepage this morning and you see the El Salvador story is the third layer down. The US media knows how to provide wall-to-wall coverage and how to elevate a “news story” to a “news event.” Think Hunter Biden or Hillary’s emails. It’s clear that the media collectively has decided that this is not a “news event.” But it should be.

Second, let’s be clear about what’s happening here: Donald Trump, a man who became famous as a grand negotiator, a man who wrote (or at least put his name on the cover of) “The Art of the Deal,” is pretending that he holds precisely no cards and no leverage with a much smaller country that he’s literally paying to hold onto these prisoners. Yesterday’s Oval Office farce with the El Salvador president should be seen as one of the most shameful moments of modern American history—and yet Trump indicated that he’s already working to make things worse by disappearing actual US citizens (“homegrowns”!) to the same gulag.

Donald Trump has turned what was originally an immigration question into the most fundamental of questions about the American constitution. Think back just two or three weeks — think how trivially easy it would have been as the first questions about the innocence of Kilmar Abrego Garcia arose for the Trump administration to say, “Oops! Our bad—we cared so much about protecting America that we moved a bit too quickly, and let’s get this guy home.” Then as now, they can surely bring him home at any minute they actually desire to, despite Trump’s and El Salvador president Bukele pretending the matter is beyond either’s control.

In fact, this premise was the explicit promise of the entire DOGE effort, as Musk laid out in the early days of the administration: “I should say we’ll also make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistakes, we will fix it very quickly.” 

We will fix it very quickly.

Think of how easy it would have been to bring this one guy home—it would have in many ways allowed them probably to strengthen public will and congressional support for the rest of the illegal disappearances into the torture gulag. (“Don’t worry! Truly innocent people don’t end up in the gulag!”) They probably would have been able to actually turbocharge the kidnappings and send several hundred more since. Instead — since Donald Trump is fundamentally sociopathically incapable of admitting a mistake — the administration dug in and one by one has crossed every red line that matters with the courts as this crisis has unfolded. (A few weeks ago, I drew the distinction between a “constitutional crisis” and a “constitutional crash,” and this, to me, does qualify as a “crisis” since there’s tension between the branches now, even as we continue to experience the larger “crash.”)

He's doing this because he wants to pick this fight — and because he wants to do worse. Once you cross this red line, there’s almost no other red line worth stopping at between democracy and full-blown authoritarianism.

We should not, for now at least, be comforted by the legal ruling that future “disappearances” require a modicum due process given that the Trump’s administration underlying argument in these cases is that once they get you out into international waters, no laws, court orders, or due process apply at all and everything that happens thereafter is totally out of bounds for legal review. This is “dropping-people-from-helicopters-into-the-ocean” legal logic.

And yet here we are. 

Third, nearly every detail we’ve learned about this group of “hardened criminals” has made their kidnapping and disappearance — worse and more inhumane.

Those 238 “hardened criminals” disappeared to El Salvador — against court orders back then even — have turned out to be anything but. “60 Minutes” dug into the records and found the vast majority have no criminal record. Many were included simply because they had tattoos that someone somewhere at some point had decided seemed vaguely threatening.

One is a gay makeup artist. 

And here’s a particularly chilling newly reported detail of one of the cases:

“Take him anyway” is a phrase that should chill us if that level of arbitrariness of interacting with a state agent can end in a Central American concentration camp and super-mega torture gulag without intervening due process.

This showdown is over a single innocent person but the entire backdrop of this event is one of the most un-American (and impeachable!) acts that any president has ever undertaken. If your two historical legal analogues are Dred Scott and Korematsu, the Japanese internment case, you’re on the wrong side of history.

And let’s be clear: This is starting with “non-citizens” but Trump wants to expand it to citizens, perhaps by “de-naturalizing” citizens, which should terrify all of us. Because this will include any and all of us.

Fourth, and lastly, let’s say that all of these men were indeed the worst of the worst. Even the worst criminals in the United States don’t deserve to be sent off to torture gulags, here or abroad, without due process.

What Stephen Miller and Donald Trump don’t understand — what they will never understand — is that due process is one of the key strengths of America, not a weakness. Due process is one of humanity’s greatest advances.

I just finished reading one of my publisher’s recent books — THE EAGLE AND THE HART — a dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV. Fourteenth century England is an era that I know almost nothing about, and reading Helen Castor’s excavation it’s impossible to not see how much of that era’s constant power struggles were really struggles over due process — court showdowns, duels, jousting matches, and too many treason trials and counter-trials to count were all signs and chapters of a government and a country lurching toward modern legal process, standards of evidence, and due process.

Due process is civilization.

John Adams understood this. 

He famously defended British Captain Thomas Preston and eight Redcoats accused of murder in the Boston Massacre, a moment in American jurisprudence that stands even today as one of the most proudest moments and traditions in the legal profession. Even the Redcoats who shot Boston colonists in the street deserved the best and most vigorous legal representation they could muster in the city of Boston.

It is the height of historical irony that Donald Trump, who so skillfully availed himself of his own “due process” to delay and stall his 94 criminal charges — 94! — long enough to return to the presidency and escape them entirely is now the one seeking to rob the rest of us of that tradition and protection.

The El Salvador test, of course, is not unfolding in a vacuum. Two of the biggest stories in American authoritarianism unfolded yesterday just a few miles from my house in Burlington, Vermont. At the federal building downtown where I go to the Post Office almost every day, there was a habeas hearing for a Tufts graduate student who wrote an oped — an oped! — in the best traditions of the First Amendment and was seized off the street for deportation; it seems clear that the case against her has been entirely manufactured, perhaps even plagiarized outright from a doxing website. A few miles away, a Palestinian man who showed up at an immigration office for what he believed was his naturalization interview found himself arrested instead and headed, presumably, for deportation. Think about the unique horror and terror of going through the work to become an American citizen, to embrace a new land celebrated for our freedom and opportunity, undergirded by our Constitutional protections, to learn all that you can about our system and tradition to pass a test that surely most native-born US citizens would flunk, and to show up for that near-final step only to find a wall of masked state agents ready to tear it all away from you. 

Central in all of these cases is this question of whether we are the country we have promised to be—or whether we’ve reached the end of that road and beyond, instead, are entering that land of dragons.

Exactly 250 years ago this Saturday, we started the fight to get to this very point of civilization, democracy, and freedom in 2025. It seems quite possible we won’t make it to Sunday as the country our Minutemen and Founders fought for.

And yet here we are.

GMG

PS: Two book reading suggestions out of today’s newsletter: If you want to learn more about the Boer War, try Candice Millard’s HERO OF THE EMPIRE, about the Boer War and how Winston Churchill made his name against the backdrop of the British war across south Africa at the turn of the last century. Given that our government is now being run by a modern-day Boer and South African oligarch, it bears more modern relevance than it should.

If you want to learn more about the Boston Massacre, try Serena Zabin’s THE BOSTON MASSACRE: A FAMILY HISTORY, which explores the little-known interconnections of the community at the time. Boston in 1770 was a small town, of course, and the shooting and trial tore at its fabric.