In an ominous episode that is still being treated as "Trump being Trump" by some portion of the corporate media, Downmarket Mussolini has once again floated the idea of transferring American citizens to a slave labor torture prison in El Salvador:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-el-salvador

Trump Backs 'Blatantly Unconstitutional' Proposal to Send US Citizen Inmates to El Salvador Prisons

"With a deadline looming for the Trump administration to return a Maryland resident to the U.S. after expelling him along with hundreds of other people to an El Salvador detention center under a shadowy deal with the Central American country, U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday stunned observers by expressing a desire to send U.S. citizens into El Salvador's prison system.

In a press briefing aboard Air Force One Sunday evening, Trump was asked by a reporter about an offer made by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to accept prisoners sent by the U.S. from its federal prison population.

"I love that," Trump said. "If we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I would be honored to give them."

"I don't know what the law says on that," he added. "I have suggested that, why should we stop at people who cross the border illegally?"

I know I'm not the only person working in this space that's getting sick of hanging on Der Führer's ever word, musing, and threat, but as we've discussed many times, part of the way this regime operates is by transforming Trump's ravings into presumed consent to act on its worst fascist impulses and plans, in a system of "enforced unreality." When the president says, multiple times, he wants to send US citizens to a gulag in El Salvador, he's being dead serious about the regime's intentions; whether that's legal, or anyone in a position to stop him will do so, is another matter entirely - but this guy isn't just talking to hear himself talk, no matter how hard that may be to believe for people who know how profoundly ignorant and unstable Trump actually is. Given that reality then, the regime's continued quest to manufacture consent for rendering US citizens to a foreign maximum security torture prison, brings up 4 important issues:

1) We literally have no idea what Trump's deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele says, and the arrangement is extra-judicial at best.

"As Trump expressed interest in expelling U.S. citizens to a foreign prison system, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council pointed out that the details of the White House's deal with Bukele have not been publicly disclosed.

"We literally know nothing about it, other than we're paying them $6 million," said Reichlin-Melnick. "No law in the United States authorizes us to pay another country to imprison people. And yet! They're doing it."

2) At the same time Der Führer is advocating for the wonders of rendering US citizens to the carceral "care" of an authoritarian foreign government aligned with the Trump regime, the US government is also arguing in court that once they send someone to CECOT, they no longer have the ability to bring them back because they don't have custody of the prisoner and El Salvador is outside of US jurisdiction. Taken together then, this means that the President of the United States is currently advocating for the wisdom of, and his right to, permanently disappear US citizens. I don't care how much of a trav-sham-mockery you think Trump is, that's arguably the most terrifying news to emerge from the entire Trump 2.0 era.

3) While Trump's current rhetoric is focused on "dangerous criminals" and the examples he gives are mostly made up violent crime stories, the reality is that this regime has been arguing that folks protesting its fascist agenda, boycotting Elon Musk, or acting to oppose a US-backed genocide by Israel in Gaza, are literally domestic terrorists and an active threat to US national security. Furthermore it requires no conjecture to connect these facts to the regime's gulag fantasies because the Attorney General has already indicated support for sending "domestic terrorist" anti-Tesla protestors to CECOT. If they want to disappear you into a gulag for depressing Elon's profit margins, you can bet they're fine with doing so for protesting a genocide, or even just opposing Trumpism in the streets.

4) While all of this sounds horrifying and impossible, the reality is that our anti-terrorism policies under the Bush administration after 9/11 have already established a precedent for the US govt shipping people to legal black holes and claiming they hold no responsibility for protecting their rights as part of the extraordinary rendition policy. As many warned at the time, the War on Terror was always destined to return home, and it seems that under Trump, it has done precisely that.

As I've argued (with mixed success) on the other account, the Trump regime "Signalgate" scandal has political relevance for folks who want this fascist government to fail, even if you, like me, do not give one flying fuck about "national security." Trump's warmonger division willfully broke multiple laws, got caught lying about it, and currently look incompetent enough that they'd struggle to run a taco stand, let alone a government. This isn't breaking news to anyone who has been paying attention, but it has inspired the larger liberal establishment to finally make *some* effort to push back against the Trump regime, and I'd rather have them doing that than meekly accepting the boot; which is precisely why the entire fascist manufacturing consent machine in and around TrumpWorld is flailing so hard to justify the regime's actions and make this go away.

For whatever value Signalgate does (or doesn't) have in slowing the Trump regime's agenda down however, I think it says a lot about why we're facing down a fascist government requested by roughly 75M voters, that the "national security" discussion has taken overwhelming precedence over acknowledging that the attack on Yemen itself was unconstitutional, and the leaks also reveal the administration confessing to a war crime.

1) https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-strikes-in-yemen

A Reminder Amid Group Chat Outrage: US Strikes on Yemen Are Unconstitutional

"The advocacy groups Just Foreign Policy, DAWN, and Action Corps released a joint statement Thursday calling on Congress to take action to stop U.S. military action in Yemen by upholding "its sole authority to declare war under Article I of the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR)."

The chat messages sent between officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz stunned the public and Washington insiders this week because they had accidentally also been sent to Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, but the three groups pointed out that they also included an admission from Vance that the strikes were not defensive—contrary to claims by President Donald Trump."

2) https://truthout.org/articles/democrat-leaked-messages-show-waltz-admitting-to-war-crime-in-yemen-strike/

Experts: Leaked Messages Show Waltz Admitting to War Crime in Yemen Strike

"In an exchange after the strikes first hit, as shown in Wednesday’s leak, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz says that the U.S. had collapsed a building that one of their Houthi targets was supposedly inside, calling it “amazing.”

“Their first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and now it’s collapsed,” Waltz said. Per the screenshots, Vice President J.D. Vance responds, “Excellent.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe says, “A good start.” Waltz then replies with a fist emoji, a U.S. flag emoji and a flame emoji.

According to Yemen Data Project, the first strike killed at least 13 civilians and injured nine on the night of March 15, hitting north of the capital, Sanaa. Yemen Data Project says that this was the bombing deemed “excellent” by the vice president and “amazing” by Waltz.

The messages are “prima facie evidence of at least one war crime applauded by the people who conspired to commit it,” wrote Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs for the Center for International Policy (CIP), on social media."

To be clear, I'm not saying these crimes by the regime aren't at least coming up on the margins of the liberal establishment; I've seen a few Democrat politicians expressing these critiques, and brief discussions in even the mainstream corporate media have occurred around these topics. The problem is that the vast *majority* of people with a platform to bring these crimes to light simply don't care. We live in a society where illegal military actions based on the thinnest of pretexts, and war crimes against (particularly Muslim) civilian targets are so normalized that it just doesn't move the needle for a political and media establishment that helped normalize this monstrous shit in the first place. If you haven't figured out by now that one of major reasons the Trump regime is (mostly) succeeding in installing a fascist dictatorship in America, is the powers granted to the imperial presidency to protect "national security" and to fight a racist, quixotic "War on Terror," I'm going to have to ask you how long you've been in a coma. A society that empowers and tolerates crimes against humanity abroad under the auspices of "keeping us safe," is a society that will tolerate the same when their leaders invariably bring the violence back home.