Donald Trump’s contempt for civil liberties and legal due process is a blaring warning sign
The footage released by Donald Trump’s White House today was a sign of intent, confirming something we’ve ignored for too long.
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Where you at, free speech warriors? How about you, libertarians? Constitutional conservatives? Any conservatives, in fact, who believe the rule of law and integrity of democratic institutions should, ahem, trump day-to-day politics?
No, really, we want to hear from you. All you folks who convinced yourselves that a second Trump presidency wouldn’t be half as bad, for civil liberties or for your professed principles, as that of an incompetent Democrat armed with the rhetorical equivalent of wet lettuce.
(Lettuce is a key ingredient in salad, you see, and Kamala Harris constantly spewed out the most cringeworthy examples of word sala... oh never mind.)
The Trump administration, in its early months, has been at least as hostile towards free speech as any US government in my memory, which admittedly only stretches back to the end of the Bill Clinton years. This after Mr Trump’s cause in last year’s election campaign was quite widely seen, in some quarters, as an existential fight to preserve freedom of speech.
It has also openly, brazenly defied the US Constitution, first by usurping the power of Congress to dictate federal spending, and then by insisting that Mr Trump should get to decide what is legal, not the courts. In other words, it has sought to place him above any restraint or reproach from the other two theoretically co-equal branches of America’s political system.
So this new Trump government is quite close to becoming everything you accused the Democrats of being. Domineering, politically retributive, contemptuous of the law, censorious, and focused on centralising power around one man.
Those are either problems for any government, full stop (the consistent position), or for any government that disagrees with your own political priors (the hypocritical position).
The pre-election warnings, among Mr Trump’s haters, that he was leaning into something dangerously close to authoritarianism now look a touch naive, if anything. And if you’re still missing that, your glasses are not rose-tinted. They’re opaque.
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Give the Trump administration credit for one clever, if unoriginal, element of its early strategy. It has done a truly wonderful job so far of picking easy, juicy, unsympathetic targets.
Foreign aid? That’s the first part of government spending anyone you poll will want to cut. Sure, it might kill a bunch of people in Africa who rely on American resources to avoid dying in childbirth, or from treatable diseases, but hey, those people are foreigners. Got to take care of your own first. Got to keep those sweet subsidies to Elon Musk’s companies flowing. We must have our priorities.
Arresting and trying to deport an anti-Israel permanent resident for protesting peacefully? Well, his views are way out of the mainstream. People don’t want to be associated with them. Who’s going to stand up for a guy like that? More on him later.
Sending alleged foreign gang members overseas, and shooting a glitzy video bragging about just how brutally you treated them? Well, who would be stupid enough to object?
“wHY aRe YOu dEFeNdINg cRImInALs?” is a really freaking easy political argument. Maybe the very easiest, in fact. Bordering on lazy, like shooting from the free throw line, or the penalty spot.
Are they criminals, though? Have we actually established that, through the normal legal process, in accordance with the laws of the United States, or are we being told to just take the government’s word for it? A government that has already lied a whole heap of times in a mere two months?
If these really are violent gang members, go through the proper process, prove it, and then deport them. Doing it without that due process is the act of a government that doesn’t actually give the slightest of damns about civil freedoms.
Watch this video, published by the Trump team. Look at the photos, sourced from a combination of US and El Salvadorian material. Ask yourself: is this the PR work of a freedom-loving government? Or something darker?
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Do you have any idea whether the men in the images above really are criminal gang members? No. Do I? No. Some of them might be. But none of us have any clue, because that claim was never tested. There was no due process at all. The Trump administration merely said they were criminals, invoked a law from the late 1700s intended for use during wartime, and we’re supposed to accept that without question.
The process, when it comes to any government’s policies, does matter, even when it sounds boring and nerdy, and even when it slows things down. The rule of law matters.
Because on day one, it’s the very easiest target being taken into custody by officers working for an agency they won’t identify, in plain clothes, who refuse to give their names. It is that guy who is being muscled into an unmarked car, and being shipped across the country to a detention centre far away from his eight-months-pregnant wife, and being denied legally required access to counsel, and being labelled a threat to American foreign policy by the government without any supporting evidence.
That is whose rights are being abrogated today. What happens six months from now?
Watch this clip next. It’s the moment Mahmoud Khalil, the US green card holder I was alluding to above, was taken into custody without explanation.
Seeing how Mahmoud Khalil was detained is unreal.
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) March 14, 2025
A guy wearing an Avengers shirt from an unnamed agency says “we have you,†they refuse to give their names and it seems he has no rights to be read while being arrested, all while his pregnant wife watches.pic.twitter.com/fPJnbz4okW
Perhaps you have faith that the Trump administration’s performative cruelty is aimed squarely, and solely, at those who definitely deserve it. Well, let me give you a couple of examples.
Last month the government made a big show of the fact that, as part of its drive to detain migrant criminals, it was sending the “worst of the worst” to Guantanamo Bay. The White House’s official spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, characterised these people as those who’d been “raping” and “murdering” Americans. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem accused some of those in question of being “pedophiles”. Mr Trump himself called them the world’s “worst criminal aliens”.
Who did we actually have, among the 180 migrants sent to Guantanamo at the time? Only two had been convicted of federal felony offences: one who had illegally re-entered America after being deported, and one who’d conspired to transport other migrants across the border.
Among the rest? Well. For example, there was a person who had one very, very black mark on his record. Murder, you may wonder? Assault? Trafficking in hardcore drugs?
Nah, a different kind of traffic offence actually. He got a ticket for riding his bike on the wrong side of the road. That is what got him labelled “the worst of the worst” and shipped off to the squalor of Guantanamo. That is what led to him being treated like the most loathsome criminal imaginable.
Let’s do another. Last week Fabian Schmidt, a legal permanent resident of the United States since 2008, was detained at the airport after returning from a trip to Europe.
Mr Schmidt’s mother, Astrid Senior, has claimed law enforcement stripped him naked, forced him into a cold shower and interrogated him “violently” for hours, then deprived him of both sleep and his medication. The government has not denied those claims, declining to comment based on privacy regulations (which, it must be noted, have not stopped it from publicly shaming other targets of its policies).
“It was just said that his green card was flagged,” Ms Senior said.
Mr Schmidt has a DUI on his record, plus a misdemeanour charge for possessing marijuana, which was already dismissed by the authorities.
Guantanamo for the guy who rode his bike in the wrong lane. Borderline torture, allegedly, for the guy who may have had some weed on him once. Disproportionate, no?
All that under the orders of the same president, by the way, who just gave full pardons to supporters of his who had been convicted of attacking police officers.
But that’s the point. It’s all theatre. It’s performative. Naked hostility to immigrants is the right-wing equivalent of the far-left’s own preposterous virtue signalling.
Those migrants who got sent to Guantanamo? Some were eventually deported. Others returned to the US. It didn’t really matter either way, because Mr Trump already had his video footage of them being treated like scum, and he’d milked it for likes on social media, and he’d absorbed the adulation of those people who tend to “yasss king” at anything he does.
Watch that video the White House was so proud of again. Ask yourself why a small army of heavily armed law enforcement officers were there to watch a handful of unarmed, completely unthreatening prisoners get manhandled off a plane. Ask yourself why it was filmed with such eye-catching production value.
Ask yourself why the White House previously posted, I kid you friggin not, an “ASMR” video featuring the oh so sensual sounds of migrants’ handcuffs and chains jingling as they were loaded onto a plane to be kicked out of the country.
It’s cruelty porn. And it approaches the visual language of a wannabe police state.
Hold back your howls of outrage and your accusations of “TDS”. You saw the same footage as me. The tone is unmistakeable; we gain nothing by pretending otherwise.
Now, you can be in favour of a police state, by all means, one that treats your perceived enemies brutally in your name. But don’t insult your own intelligence by pretending that is freedom. It’s the antithesis. It’s the stuff of El Salvador, or Hungary, or worse.
Let’s discuss Mr Khalil, who was taken into custody after leading anti-Israel protests on the campus of Columbia University. The government is now trying to deport him.
He’s a permanent resident of the US, and is married to a heavily pregnant US citizen. Upon his arrest, he was taken across the country to Louisiana, separating him from his family. He’s been held there ever since, and was denied access to a lawyer until a judge intervened.
The Trump administration has accused him of “leading activities aligned to Hamas”, without providing any supporting information. He has not been charged with any crime. He has not been accused of committing or inciting violence. No proof has been offered of a connection to Hamas, or to any other terrorist group. There is no evidence, as far as we can tell, of Mr Khalil being a national security threat.
By all appearances, then – until the government offers any evidence at all to the contrary – this guy is facing deportation, despite being a legal resident, for voicing opinions the Trump machine doesn’t like.
Where are you, self-described free speech absolutists?
Elon Musk spent day after day, not so long ago, tweeting in defence of those who had organised violent riots in Britain, and who had explicitly called for Muslims to be killed. Mr Musk said their imprisonment for inciting violence was an attack on freedom of speech, and said the judges responsible for those sentences should be in jail instead.
Nothing to say about this, though. Nothing. Crickets. Could not care less. Because Mr Khalil doesn’t share his ideology.
You want to support this stuff? Fine. But you do not get to rabbit on and on and on about Donald Trump restoring freedom of speech.
Look at his record, just in recent months.
Suing media companies for coverage he didn’t like. Saying unfavourable stories about him should be “illegal”. Punishing law firms for representing the wrong clients. Trying to dictate the curriculum of private schools, and threatening to withdraw funding unless they comply. Detaining the likes of Mr Khalil, and foreshadowing more such arrests in the near future.
We could keep going, believe me. The point is, it has become extremely obvious that this president has no qualms at all about wielding the power of America’s government to suppress legal forms of speech.
The fact that he has chosen easy, unsympathetic targets has no substantive value when you judge his actions. Legal protections and other rights are not just there for the people with whom you agree – if that were the case, what would even be the point of them? We wouldn’t need them. No, they’re supposed to protect everyone, including those you might hate.
One standard for everybody. One standard. Not a high standard of protection for a Trump voter in Kentucky and another, lesser standard for an immigrant in southern California.
Nobody cares when the target is a criminal, or an illegal immigrant. What comes next, though? The legal immigrant who has obviously objectionable views. Then, perhaps, the legal immigrant whose views are merely anti-Trump. Do we then move on to US citizens?
We are already halfway down that scale, and we’re two months into the four-year term of a president who has been fantasising, very publicly, about punishing his enemies for years.
Conservatives love, love to talk about the proverbial slippery slope, and they’re often right to do so. Here’s one such slope, a perilously steep one, stretching out right in front of us.
Let’s not sleepwalk any further down it.
Twitter: @SamClench
Originally published as Donald Trump’s contempt for civil liberties and legal due process is a blaring warning sign
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