The president doubles down.

P resident Trump acknowledged that, if he wanted to, he could get Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States by calling El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and explaining that that’s what he wanted done. But, in a combative interview with ABC News, the president said he would not do that because Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member.

Referring to Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran illegal alien the Trump administration repatriated despite a 2019 “withholding of removal” order that prohibited his deportation to El Salvador, Trump told ABC’s Terry Moran, “If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that” — meaning, call Bukele. “But he is not.”

To repeat what I’ve explained before (here and here), Abrego Garcia is not covered by the agreement under which, for a $6 million payment by the Trump administration, Bukele agreed to detain about 300 alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA gang) for a year. Consequently, Abrego Garcia is not in constructive American custody.

Hence, to comply with the Supreme Court’s April 10 order — which was for the government “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador” — Trump would have to be willing to engage diplomatically on the subject with the Salvadoran government. Trump is adamant that he will not do so.

The president should do it because he should want to correct his administration’s violation of law. The president knows, however, that the Supreme Court cannot force him to negotiate with a foreign regime — neither constitutionally nor practically. And for him to back down at this point would be treated by the media-Democratic complex as a humiliating admission of error. He won’t abide that and doesn’t seem bothered that it is bound to hurt him in the not-too-distant future, when the Supreme Court will rule on matters of importance to Trump’s agenda.

In the Oval Office interview marking his 100th day in office (transcript here), Moran pointed out that the Trump Justice Department lawyer admitted in court that it was an error to send Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. Trump replied that the lawyer who made the admission “was here a long time, was not appointed by us [and] should not have said that.”

In fact, when he made the admission, the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, had just been promoted by the Trump Justice Department to be acting deputy director of the DOJ’s Office of Immigration Litigation. His admission not only was undoubtedly correct; it was repeated to the Supreme Court as a factual concession by Trump’s own appointed solicitor general, D. John Sauer. That is why, in its opinion, the Supreme Court wrote: “The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s attorney general and deputy attorney general, Pamela Bondi and Todd Blanche, suspended Reuveni after his admission of error to Judge Paula Xinis.

In the ABC interview, Trump sparred with Moran, insisting that Abrego Garcia had “MS-13” tattooed “on his knuckles.” When Moran countered that the photograph of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles, which the president brandished in a Truth Social post, had been photoshopped, Trump became insistent: “Terry, Terry, Terry . . . M-S-one-three. It says ‘M-S-one-three.”

There are conflicting photographic images. Photos published by Abrego Garcia’s wife and the Salvadoran government do not show “M-S-1-3” grafted on his knuckles, which is why there is a claim that the image Trump has promoted is photoshopped. I am in no position to broker the competing claims. I will note, however, that analyses of Abrego Garcia’s various tattoos, going back to his 2019 removal proceedings, have proceeded on the premise that the imagery — a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with the letter X for eyes, a cross, and a skull — could be interpreted as MS-13 gang tattoos, not that Abrego Garcia bore “M-S-1-3” tattoos, as many members of that gang reportedly do.

In any event, the argument on the point, and Moran’s mention of “photoshopping,” induced the president to snark:

Hey, they’re giving you [Moran] the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doing the interview. I picked you because, frankly, I never heard of you. But that’s okay — but I picked you, Terry, but you’re not being very nice.

Following Trump’s election in November, ABC News’s parent company, Disney, paid $16 million to settle a defamation suit arising out of the sloppy claim by George Stephanopoulos, ABC’s star anchor (and former Clinton White House aide), that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. He had actually been found liable, in a civil trial, for sexual assault by forcible touching. (I wrote about the settlement, here.) During the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign, moreover, Trump blasted ABC debate moderators David Muir (the anchor of ABC’s nightly news program) and Linsey Davis for patent bias favoring his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. The New York Post’s Page Six has reported that Trump’s agreement with ABC to do the 100th-day interview was conditioned on the exclusion of Stephanopoulos and Muir.

The president’s acknowledgment that he could intercede with Bukele to get Abrego Garcia back is sure to cause headaches for the Justice Department. Its lawyers have maintained that the federal government is powerless to return Abrego Garcia because he is exclusively under Bukele’s control. Not surprisingly, Trump couldn’t bring himself to say that he can’t countermand the Salvadoran president. Yet, by saying he could do it but won’t, he is inviting a clash with Judge Xinis, to whom the DOJ is supposed to resume reporting today on the administration’s efforts to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

During the interview, the president repeated the claim previously made by Vice President JD Vance that the Biden administration had allowed 20 million illegal aliens to enter the United States — Trump, in fact, goosed the number up to 21 million. As I’ve previously related, the more accurate estimate is about half that, which is an appalling figure that shouldn’t need exaggeration to make the points Trump rightly makes about the border collapse and the illegal immigration crisis he inherited.

The president was confusing in discussing federal law’s due process requirements on deportation. Moran tried to get him to concede that all the aliens he wants to deport, including the Venezuelan aliens he has designated as terrorists and alien enemies, are entitled to posit legal challenges to their deportation — which is what the Trump Justice Department has conceded and what the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled. The president would not agree to this premise.

Trump repeated the administration’s new line that it’s impossible to give “trials” to all “21 million” people he was elected to kick out of the country. Moran corrected him, pointing out that the law requires more streamlined “hearings,” not trials, for illegal aliens who choose to contest their removal. Trump countered that this was too burdensome because many of the people he wants to remove are violent criminals. When Moran observed, “The law is the law, sir. The law is the law, and you’re sworn to uphold it,” Trump responded, “No, no. The law doesn’t say anything about trials.” That’s true, but it was Trump, not Moran, who was claiming otherwise.

Trump brushed aside the due process point, insisting, “If these people came in, they’re not citizens, they came in illegally, they come into our country illegally, we have to get them out.” He soon added, “We follow the legal process,” but:

I can’t have a trial, a major trial, for every person that came in illegally. We have thousands of murderers that came in. They’re gonna murder people. They already have murdered people in our country. We have to get them out and we have to get them out fast.

As Trump spoke, Moran had tried to interject his agreement that many of the aliens are “bad guys,” and finally asserted, “But in our country, even bad guys get due process, right?”

Trump replied, “Well, they get a process where we have to get them out, yeah.”

Subsequently, Moran read Trump a quote from Joe Rogan, the podcaster Trump has befriended, who said it was dangerous to be “rounding up gang members and shipping them to El Salvador with no due process,” because “we gotta be careful that we don’t become monsters while we’re fighting monsters.”

The president replied, “I agree with that.”

I guess it depends on who’s stating the obvious.