Since its earliest days, America has prided itself on having a government of laws, not of men.

The driving idea of John Adams was written into the Massachusetts constitution – the model for the United States, Japan, Germany, India and South Africa – as the best way to build a country free from tyranny.

If you can protect freedom, you can create more freedom for everyone. Or as Bono memorably put it more recently: “America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea of opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.”

So where does that great American idea stand today, 17 months into its 45th presidency?



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There have been many hyperbolic words said and written about Donald Trump. No, the rule of law has not come to an end in the gruesome Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale.

But in his own words, thoughts and actions, Trump is surely the most un-American president in living memory. It is no small irony that he wraps his un-American activities in the flag.

Where his predecessors saw it as part of their job to reaffirm the American idea, Trump has entirely surrendered this position. Even in the darkest days of the war on terror – with an administration that justified waterboarding and indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay – former president George W Bush cast his worldview as fundamentally American: “Stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,” he said in 2003.

When it comes to immigration … he clearly thinks that stability can only be purchased at the expense of liberty

For Trump, it’s safe to say that he believes in the polar opposite. When it comes to immigration, in a nation of immigrants, he clearly thinks that stability can only be purchased at the expense of liberty.

This isn’t just a question of a few presidential tweets, although it’s also a question of a few presidential tweets.

“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” he wrote on Sunday, continuing his long and ugly habit of demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants. Never mind that the country is not in fact enduring some kind of invasion, or that the number of undocumented immigrants peaked in 2007.

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents …”

It’s hard to unpack this tweet without having the power to prescribe medication, but duty calls, nonetheless. Trump confusingly longs for the days of no judges and courts as the best way to restore law and order.

His thinking is only slightly more ludicrous than his capitalization. It’s like declaring that immigrants should Speak Spanish to Defend English. (Memo to the White House: this could be a great play for midterms.)



The final line is the giveaway here. Having burnt himself by separating more than 2,300 children from their parents, Trump now insists that the children really traveled alone. Perhaps they could self-deport themselves from their own detention.



It’s surely only a matter of time before Trump describes the disappearance of separated children in those terms. At least one teenager has walked out of a Brownsville “childcare center” which refuses to behave like a detention center. According to the center’s spokesman, several more have done the same.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Trump now insists that the children really traveled alone. Perhaps they could self-deport themselves from their own detention.’ Photograph: Handout/Reuters

Unkind souls might think these non-detention centers are a new form of “catch and release” – a policy that Trump insists he is trying to fix, apparently by creating a policy called “catch and walk out the door”.

If you think you’re protecting your citizens from a tidal wave of MS-13 gang recruits, this seems a curious approach. But if you’re just interested in punishing kids because you hate brown-skinned immigrants from the south, it all makes perfect sense.

Fortunately, historians have the president’s own thumbs to thank for explaining his contradictory excuses for a policy. Why does Trump want to end the rule of law at the border? Why does he ignore court rulings, legislation and international agreements stating that even the undocumented have constitutional rights to due process and the legal right to claim asylum?

Because he sees it all as a deterrent. The rule of law is just one big complicated obstruction to the cheap efficiency of ending the idea of America for those who want to become part of it.

“Hiring many thousands of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go – will always be disfunctional,” he misspelled on Twitter. “People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the US illegally. Children brought back to their country….

“If this is done, illegal immigration will be stopped in it’s [sic] tracks – and at very little, by comparison, cost. This is the only real answer – and we must continue to BUILD THE WALL,” he explained.

It’s true. Hiring more immigration judges, as Republicans like Ted Cruz have proposed, would cost more. It is so much cheaper to end the rule of law. All this in an immigration system where an individual US officer already has the power to dismiss asylum claims on the spot, based on their view of whether the immigrant faces a credible fear of persecution.

These verbal eruptions on Twitter are too easily dismissed when you consider Trump’s track record of ignoring the law on immigration. His efforts to instate a Muslim travel ban were knocked down by several of those pesky judges, who may well rule against his recent hastily written order to end child separation by detaining families together indefinitely.

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The lovers and haters of Trump are no doubt enjoying this whole spectacle. Trump lovers seem to enjoy the sight of their idol protecting them against the immigrant invaders, restoring order to a chaotically changing culture. America’s haters seem to take some strange kind of pleasure in seeing American hypocrisy in the open air without any effort to stand up for human rights and freedom. Trump has made the world so simple.

But the great idea of America has more staying power than a tweet, an executive order and a single, xenophobic president. It endures in the courts, in the justice department, in the state attorneys general and the special counsel investigations. It’s far more real than a wall that will never get built.