Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places. – Donald Trump to president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele

The American people trust President Trump because they know he only acts in the best interest of our country. – White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt

If an illegal alien criminal breaks into our country, the only due process he is entitled to is deportation. – White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller

We are all afraid. – Senator Lisa Murkowski R-Alaska

Worry? How can one not? The Trump administration’s aggressive persistence in fomenting fear through intimidation among the American citizenry and institutions is shameful as well as scary. How with bald faced effrontery Trump announced himself your Retribution president. Having received death threats and vile insults as a result of opposition to the Trump agenda, Murkowski has every reason to be afraid. More than one Republican Congressman has privately voiced a similar fear for not towing the MAGA line. The Republican House majority cowers before the boss and willingly abdicates its responsibility as an equal branch of government.

The administration appears to relish its cruelty. Consider the recent televised Oval Office appearances between Trump and Zelensky first, followed by that between Trump and Bukele. Trump, with the proud assistance of J.D. Vance, humiliated Zelensky for insufficient gratitude for the administration’s support in Ukraine’s war with Russia. Never mind that Trump would settle the war by more or less rewarding Russia’s aggression. (Little Marco, looking on in stupefied embarrassment, certainly lived up to the name Trump had bestowed upon him during the 2016 presidential debates.) Zelensky was then, essentially, ejected him from the White House.

The media spectacle is important to Trump’s playbook. He takes every opportunity to assert his authoritative masculinity to the public. How shameful that he shared with Bukele a certain glee over the deportation to an El Salvador prison of more than two hundred purported terrorists none of whom was accorded the constitutionally guaranteed right to argue his case in court. The administration is paying Bukele for holding the deportees in prison. Most Chautauqua County residents will be familiar with the name Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, deported as a result of administrative error, who remains incarcerated in El Salvador. The Justice department lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who admitted the clerical error was subsequently fired for undermining the government’s case against Abrego Garcia. Asked why it couldn’t simply return him to the US, the government replied, laughingly, that it had no power to do so. In a recent Time magazine interview Trump declared, in what must have been a shock to Stephen Miller and the rest of the administration deportation fanatics, that he could easily facilitate the return. Obviously, he has chosen not to.

The federal judiciary, according to Trump, is besieged with radical lunatic judges. Judges who deserve to be impeached. Consider the arrest of Hannah Dugan, the Milwaukee county judge hauled off in handcuffs by ICE agents for having obstructed the arrest of an undocumented immigrant during a hearing in her courtroom. The agents produced what they called an administrative warrant. Dugan directed the agents to speak with her court’s chief judge. Whereupon she escorted the defendant and his attorney through a nonpublic jury door. With what authority may ICE agents obstruct courtroom proceedings? Legal experts have called the matter a further escalation of the administration’s attack on the judiciary.

Call it what it is. The administration has imposed a police state on the country. The latest injustice involves the arrest of Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Mahdawi, like his colleague Mahmoud Kahlil, presently in detention in a Louisiana prison, was active in the Columbia protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. Mahdawi, a permanent legal resident and holder of a green card, had appeared before immigration authorities for a naturalization hearing. ICE agents, waiting behind closed doors, seized him. He was placed in detention in Vermont where he lives. As with Kahlil the government claims Mahdawi’s speech is a threat to American foreign policy and a blatant antisemitic profession. The government equates the free speech right to protest the slaughter in Gaza with antisemitism. Mahdawi remained in detention for two weeks. Last Wednesday, April 30, Judge Geoffrey Crawford granted him bail. Crawford called the affair a “chilling action by the government intended to shut down debate.” Mahdawi still faces an immigration hearing.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk’s plaything, has seized personal data about US citizens from dozens of federal agency databases including the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Apparently, the plan is to merge the combined data into a master database within the Department of Homeland Security. Sensitive personal information such as bank account numbers, social security numbers, etc., will then be available to the Trump administration. One needs no active imagination to consider to what nefarious purposes such information might be used.

Worried?

Paul Leone is a Jamestown resident.