Trump Tests the True Limits of Presidential Power

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

 

For those unaware of the details of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia controversy, I commend to you National Review’s excellent, concise editorial explaining it, and I advise you to read it before proceeding. Briefly, a Salvadoran illegal immigrant here under an asylum claim was erroneously and hastily deported without due process of law, and the Trump administration is refusing to return him to the United States for his proper day in court.

 

For those who already know the specifics of the controversy, allow me to state my understanding of its true stakes: This is the latest and most perfectly emblematic example of the new Trump administration’s willingness to test the law well past its limits and do so by demonstrating gleefully naked contempt for it. It is all too easy to see why it is being either cheered on or winked at by Trump’s supporters and regarded with indifference by the masses. But it should alarm you deeply.

 

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia to America from El Salvador so that his claims can be adjudicated. (He currently sits there under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for the use of his notoriously brutal mega-prisons to house potential deportees.) This weekend the Trump administration refused, claiming, on stunningly disingenuous logic, that because Abrego Garcia had been dumped quickly into El Salvador he was now beyond American jurisdiction. (“He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”)

 

Why not just ask El Salvador to return him? Conveniently, President Bukele — who just happened to be in America on an official state visit — sat in the Oval Office yesterday morning and was able to answer that question: There’s just nothing I can do, alas. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” (Bukele proceeded to smugly chuckle with Trump about how it would be nice to be able to send Americans, too, to his mega-prisons.)

 

What matters most about this cynical shell game is the transparent contempt for the law on display. Bukele is not his own man, after all; the purpose of his appearance yesterday was to read lines I can only speculate were at least reviewed by Stephen Miller, who sat in on the press conference to pretend that the Supreme Court had ruled 9–0 in favor of Trump rather than against him. Bukele, Trump, and Miller all wore Cheshire cat grins as they calmly told the world that the matter was out of their hands, even though all know the opposite to be true.

 

And everybody understands why the Trump administration feels free to defy the law: It believes it has the people on its side. He’s an illegal, anyway! We’re here to deport illegals. Who cares exactly how they’re expelled from the country, that’s not America’s problem. Miller said as much in the Oval Office press conference with Bukele. His primary defense to reporters was, “If [Abrego Garcia] was your neighbor, you would move right away.” In other words: Trust us, he’s a bad guy, so who cares how we got rid of him?

 

We have seen this attitude on display already in various other facets of the Trump administration: in the casual disregard for protocol embodied by Elon Musk’s DOGE, yes, but also with other bungled deportations and most flagrantly with Trump’s openly lawless decision, ten days ago, to delay closing TikTok in direct contravention of the black letter of a bill voted for by Congress and signed into law by his predecessor. The Abrego Garcia case is only the freshest example of what is now a clearly demonstrated pattern of willingness — indeed, desire — on the part of the administration to flout the procedural, constitutional, and prudential limits of the law in every field.

 

This is no accident; it is a strategy. Whereas DOGE culture came preinstalled with the Silicon Valley ethos of “Move fast and break things,” the wreckage in that case was at least plausibly explainable as the product of accident: impatience and a lack of proper understanding that led to avoidable error. Meanwhile, others in this administration move fast in order to intentionally break things, to expand presidential power by forcing it down the throat of a quiescent legislature and a paralyzed judiciary. Although this approach assuredly represents the will of Donald Trump, the details of its legal execution are masterminded by Miller, whose fingerprints are all over the administration’s actions in the Garcia case. Trump has instincts; Miller has a plan.

 

What makes Miller’s maximalist theory of executive power scary is that it is analytical rather than emotional: His insight is not that presidential power should be wielded semi-autocratically but that it can be. And he is determined to test the outermost limits of that power, confident as he is that — having survived two impeachments and succeeded at reelection — the president is functionally beyond the reach of both the law and the demos itself. (Imagine the circus bear in The Far Side removing his muzzle and telling his friend, “Hey . . . these things just snap right off.”)

 

Trump cares only about public opinion; Miller trusts that the people will not care, so the law can be defied to serve Trump’s populist goals. I am terrified that he is correct. Who can force Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States? Who can compel Trump to execute the TikTok ban? Who among his own party would condemn him? Who of the opposition party could hope to topple him?

 

And what law then restrains the president? Yesterday in the Oval Office, Miller and Trump were forced to insouciantly pretend that the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled against them. What comes next, should the court “clarify” its position? Don’t be surprised to see the Trump administration drop the pretense and deny the validity of the Supreme Court’s rulings altogether.

 

Donald Trump added a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office — an addition reputedly encouraged by none other than Stephen Miller. The reason suggests itself ominously enough in the current context. Jackson is famous for many things, but none more relevant now than his reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832): “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

 

A test of the rule of law is coming. It is not enough to write about this phenomenon with clinical detachment; it must be opposed. If not, I assure you that the spirits unleashed by Trump and Miller, perhaps seemingly innocuous now, will eventually consume us all. I’m not here to persuade you. I’m here to warn you.