Trump, the would-be king, and his enablers

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

It is ironic that this week, as we celebrate the 249th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, which established the United States of America and freed it from the British monarchy, we have a president who believes himself to be king and has alarmingly expanded his executive powers. One of his enablers is the nation’s own Supreme Court.

Last Friday’s high court ruling, linked to President Donald Trump’s plans to deny birthright citizenship to those born in the United States to undocumented parents, did not address the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order.

But it did overturn the rulings of lower court judges who blocked Trump’s plan. In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that judges cannot issue nationwide injunctions but must limit them to the states and jurisdictions where the president’s plans have been challenged.

In theory, the 22 states, individuals, and organizations that challenged Trump’s directive would be protected from the executive order. The Supreme Court ruled that class action lawsuits remain a viable remedy for challenging and blocking federal policies deemed unconstitutional, as in the case at hand.

Although the case on birthright citizenship will continue, the Supreme Court’s ruling favors Trump’s plans on this and other issues by restricting the ability of lower courts to block executive actions deemed unconstitutional or illegitimate.

And it is even more alarming because even if the appealed cases return to the Supreme Court, the conservative-majority body tends to rule in favor of Trump. It is the same court that granted the president immunity and now appears to favor him by undermining the powers of the judiciary.

Trump has been exerting significant control over all branches of government, not just the executive. The narrowly Republican-controlled Congress is Trump’s rubber stamp, where spineless lawmakers put the president’s political agenda ahead of the interests of their constituents and the voters who put them in office.

The most vivid example is the reconciliation bill that the Senate just passed despite multimillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid and nutritional assistance programs, all to finance tax cuts for billionaires while increasing the debt ceiling and the deficit.

Also, let’s not forget that it includes a monumental budget for national security and the border to finance the police state that Trump has turned immigration enforcement into. That’s more than $150 billion for national security and its agencies, especially ICE.

Public policy expert Don Moynihan wrote that ICE’s detention budget is expected to increase by 365%, from $3.4 billion in the current fiscal year to $45 billion by the end of fiscal year 2029. This figure exceeds the budget for the correctional system in all 50 federal prisons.

Moynihan added that “the ICE detention budget is larger than the total annual budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education or SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC, and cancer research combined. It is on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who broke the tie to pass Trump’s budget bill, admitted on social media that no matter what the bill contains or the criticism against it, the most important thing is the money for deportations.

“Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

Trump and his entourage are destroying everything in their path, including support networks for those most in need, many of whom voted for him, to solidify his deportation machine and benefit his billionaire benefactors.

But this would-be king has more sinister plans and has facilitators in Congress and on the nation’s highest court. What’s next on his list?

The original Spanish version is here.