As he lionizes a strongman, Trump flexes power over the law, top colleges a

CNN
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Only three months into his new term, President Donald Trump is escalating a battle against institutions that challenge his strongman instincts, including the courts, the legal profession, elite education and the media.

The administration is projecting presidential authority in a broader and more overt way than any modern White House. Its expansive interpretation of statues and questionable interpretations of judges’ rulings is causing alarm about its impact on the rule of law, freedom of expression and the Constitution.

“There’s something broken,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday. “The liberal establishment – but they’re not running things anymore in this country.”

He sat beside President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who brands himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” and whose huge popularity is based on a brand of elected authoritarianism Trump admires. The warmth lavished on a leader who’d have been treated as a pariah by a conventional US administration was a ominous window into the 47th president’s future intentions.

Bukele has suspended parts of the Salvadoran constitution and imprisoned tens of thousands of people without due process in a crackdown against crime.

He suggested Trump might try something similar. “Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate, you know. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. You know, that’s the way it works, right?”

Trump’s own hardline aspirations were revealed in the meeting through the prism of his increasingly ruthless deportation policy, which is raising profound questions about apparent abuses of due process and human rights.

Both presidents relished the chance to publicly refuse to release an undocumented migrant who was seized in Maryland and deported to a notorious mega-prison in his native El Salvador without a court hearing and despite a judge’s order that he should not be sent back to the country.

The White House is refusing to act on another judge’s order that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should be brought back to the US and is walking a fine line on a Supreme Court decision saying it must facilitate his return. It says Abrego Garcia is a gang member and terrorist despite producing no public evidence. It also argues that US courts have no jurisdiction because Abrego Garcia’s fate is bound up in Trump’s power to set foreign policy.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 last week that the administration must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia after it admitted expelling him over an administrative error. But the White House is using its rather imprecise language – perhaps motivated by a push for unity or a desire to avoid a…