A Missed Opportunity for Performative Mercy at the White House
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has been in a foreign torture center since March 15, 2025. That is 54 days of not knowing whether he will be freed, and counting. Although his case is well known -- especially because the Trump Administration itself admitted in court that this deportation was the result of an "administrative error" -- he is hardly the only person who remains in one or another hellhole to which they have been sent by this White House, with no end in sight. Terrifyingly, it seems more likely that many more innocent people will join them than that those currently imprisoned will be released any time soon -- or ever.
As with all things related to the current regime, I find myself among those who are genuinely struggling to understand why these things are happening even if one goes down the rabbit hole and tries to work within the confines of Trumpian logic, such as it is. It seems again and again that the Administration is missing opportunities to advance its own agenda when it would be possible to do so via strategies that they would consider to be winners. Yet they continue to leave the proverbial money on the table.
We have an idea of why Republicans in Congress are not trying to stop any of this. Or at least, we have the concepts of an idea. Lisa Murkowski, the Republican US senator from Alaska, made news recently by saying this: "We are all afraid. [long pause] It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right."
To my knowledge, Murkowski has not filled in the details in terms of what she and "all" of her colleagues are afraid of. The word "retaliation" -- even when it is "real" -- can mean almost anything. Is it a social media post from Trump that leads to angry emails from constituents? Is it a threat to run an opponent against them in their next elections? Is it threats to order abusive tax audits? pull contracts? intimidate business partners to sever ties? Is it the possibility of direct civil or criminal action by the Administration?
Or is it directing Brownshirts to visit violence on the dissenting Republicans? Again, Murkowski did not elaborate, but her former colleague Mitt Romney did reveal in late 2023 that "during the Senate trial [after Trump's second impeachment by the House in January 2021], ... one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, [but] the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right."
As I wrote shortly after that news aired, Romney's decision to withhold that screamingly important story for almost three years (only to reveal it as part of a book release) was shocking and irresponsible. But if Murkowski now means that she and others are afraid for their lives or the lives of their loved ones, then one supposes that the very fear she is talking about explains why she is using such nonspecific language. I continue to believe that she and others need to level with the world about what is happening and should try to stop it, but maybe Murkowski lacks the personal wealth that allows Romney to pay for heavy-duty personal security.
In any event, to my knowledge Murkowski has not done or even said anything about Trump's illegal detentions and deportations, and she certainly did not join her Democratic colleague Chris Van Hollen on his trip to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia three weeks ago. No matter the reason, the most independent-minded of the current Republican caucus is apparently not doing anything about any of this.
Which brings us back to the Trump team, which for good reason believes that it has the power and party backing to do -- or not do -- whatever it wants. But why do they want to keep doing something that truly is a public-relations problem and that they could resolve at any moment to their own advantage? My working title for this column was: "Why the stubbornness? Next-Level Stubbornness is Not n-Dimensional Chess," which tried to capture the long-stale idea that everything Trump does is "the art of the deal," so long as we can retcon the story as needed.
Other explanations for these episodes of stubbornness include "Trump wants to be perceived as strong, so he can't back down," or "Trump needs to own the libs, so he can't give them a win." But neither of those explanations holds up, because in fact Trump changes his mind all the time, and he always has. His chaotic moves regarding tariffs in the last month or so are a useful example, especially because their very unpredictability worsens the economic damage by making it impossible for people or businesses to make plans. Even short of that, however, Trump has flip-flopped on everything from crypto to Ukraine.
Indeed, Jordan Klepper put it this way in his monologue on a recent episode of "The Daily Show":
Tariffs are just the most famous example. He's been backtracking all over the place. Just for example, he un-fired federal workers he had fired. He put back DEI web pages he had taken down. He un-canceled student visas that he canceled. He un-nominated the Attorney General he already nominated, and so on, and so on, and so on. [A total of ten headlines popped up on screen around Klepper's face.] At a certain point, you've got to ask: Does Trump even want to be a dictator? Because I've never heard a dictator call "backsies" this much.
Again, none of the proffered explanations of Trump's refusals to change his mind work, because they are all attempts to describe someone who always refuses to change his mind. And that is not Trump. What could explain when he is stubborn and when he is flexible?
There are plenty of things that Donald Trump does and says that make no sense substantively but that one can nonetheless explain fairly simply. To look at only three of countless examples: he fervently believes that international trade is a win-lose proposition and that the rest of the world is ripping off the United States, so he imposes tariffs on the rest of the world: he cannot allow himself to believe that he lost an election, so he makes up stories about winning the popular vote in 2016 and then winning reelection in 2020; and he is a big fan of autocrats, so he fights with small-d democratic leaders and lavishes praise on dictators.
None of that is even a little bit complicated in terms of figuring out Trump's motivation. He has some issues to which he seems highly committed, but of the three such examples above, it is only the middle one (that he won the 2020 election) about which Trump has been consistent.
More generally, Trump insults people because he is the poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. As an interesting aside, it turns out that the Wikipedia page for said effect includes this clarification: "In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task." Yet both the pop culture version and the correct version of Dunning-Kruger would seem to apply to Trump, because he has never shown much in the way of general intelligence and truly lacks any skills relevant to any particular tasks.
The question, however, is why Trump digs in his heels on matters that would seem to make absolutely no difference to him, or more interestingly, on matters that he could turn into a public relations win. As I noted above, he even becomes rigid about matters when a pivot could be to his advantage, starting with the Abrego Garcia case and others that have broken through the news maelstrom.
Notably, Trump could have responded to his administration's erroneous deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia by making a big show of mercy, saying: "See? We're reasonable people, and we only want to keep out the killers and rapists. When something unintended happens and we can make things right, that's what we do. So this proves that what we're doing is great." One can even picture a nauseating, staged scene at the White House with Trump forcing Abrego Garcia to stand in front of cameras and thank him for his enlightened and merciful intervention.
Again, Trump's track records shows that he is perfectly willing to change course whenever it suits him. Even his (now former?) co-President defended his own irresponsible actions by saying: "We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes." Musk said those words in front of Donald Trump, in the Oval Office, almost three months ago. Did it make Musk look weak? It made him look clueless in the sense that he seemed to believe that there is no irreversible damage caused by any of his mistakes, but if anything, it is one of the few things that Musk has said that made it easier for his defenders to defend him. "He's not an unreasonable man, ya know? Look, he just admitted that he's human and will fix his errors. Why would anyone have a problem with that?"
Trump could therefore be scoring a big win and undermining his critics, basking in an unearned outpouring of praise. That praise would of course come from the very same people on Fox and elsewhere who are currently trashing the humane narratives about Abrego Garcia and others, because these are the "journalists" who are committed to saying that we have always been at war with Eurasia and that Eastasia has always been our friend. More to the point, however, the mainstream press would at least have to concede that Trump had done something good.
Yes, the amount of exaltation that Trump could force the man and his family to lavish upon him would be difficult to watch, but that is the point: Trump loves getting people to say he is great (just check out one of his cabinet meetings), and here he has an almost unimaginably useful opportunity to get the people whose lives he has ruined to thank him profusely. He could even set up a series of such events with other victims of his cruelty praising him for being their savior. Maybe he could have the deported 4-year-old cancer victim (and US citizen) sit next to him, innocently smiling and saying, "Thank you, Mr. President," while wearing a little MAGA cap?
Instead, Trump has decided to insist that he was right all along, going all in on a story about the tattoos on Abrego Garcia's hands. For those who have already forgotten (this story being about a week old, so it has already been overtaken by the next wave of outrages), Trump saw a photo that had been altered to show MS13 finger tattoos on the innocent man's hands, and Trump concluded that the added text is the translated versions of those tattoos (using a secret decoder ring, one supposes). Rather than understanding that the text had very obviously been added to the photo, Trump told an interviewer angrily that the actual letters and numbers were right there on the man's hands. Probably the best mockery of Trump's confusion regarding those tattoos was from Desi Lydic on "The Daily Show," who said (starting at the 9:29 mark): "Now I understand why he's so proud of that 'Gulf of America' poster. He thinks 'Gulf of America' is actually written on top of the water!"
Again, however, what is the point of any of this? Trump has figured out how to do one-eighties and double-backs throughout his life, from his opinions on cryptocurrencies to his tariffs to his party affiliation. Yes, he has been stubborn about the Central Park Five even after they were fully cleared, and race is again a factor here. But he does change his mind, quite often. Why is this one Maryland resident's case such a hill for Trump to die on -- especially when it could be so politically useful to Trump?
-- Neil H. Buchanan