Dictators Sure Do Love Their Propaganda

 

All the world is a stage, including social media (maybe especially there):

There was the pool furniture in the background. There were the tropical drinks, which looked to be margaritas garnished with cherries. And then there were the deported prisoner and the American senator, sitting and chatting.

That senator, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, accused El Salvador’s government on Friday of aiming to paint the picture of a leisurely respite for the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by staging their meeting with drinks appearing to be alcohol, and angling to set the meeting by a hotel pool.

Van Hollen referred to the stagecraft with a term that had ricocheted around social media for much of the day: “Margaritagate.”

“Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” the Democratic senator said, calling the whole situation “a lesson” in “the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on.”

Dictators dare you to ignore the context and accept their frames. Are their images improbable or too good/convenient to be true?

Well: 

The Homegrowns are Next

 

Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough." pic.twitter.com/o20thGNK9e

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2025

Trump is serious, He wants to deport US citizens to an El Salvador hellhole. Don't kid yourself it will be for "good reasons".  Accept and believe the evidence of your eyes and ears: this man genuinely believes that people who criticize him or those who help him should be labelled criminals. The threat of being "disappeared" is how Trump means to manage dissent in this country.

But it's not just the first amendment that is in danger. It's the whole bill of rights. 

 He doesn't believe in due process or the Constitution, and neither does his attorney general. His White House is full of people who will simply lie regarding this one man--but they will also lie about anyone Trump deems an enemy of the people, because that is how the lies of weak people work. 

They don't suddenly develop a conscience somewhere down the line. The weakness corrodes every scruple, and soon the rule of law is gone.

This should be front page, five-alarm, screaming bloody murder news. It's time to call it fascism, and it's time to seriously talk about impeachment and removal. It's past time, even. But it might not be too late.

Juris Doctor Vance, Not So Young, Also Not Credible

 

While we can tell ourselves that part of Karoline Leavitt's juvenile dissembling attempts are sheer youth and immaturity, we know for sure that Vice-Signaling Junior President Vance "tells stories" with a purpose. So, when he condescendingly insults a reporter for not having read a court document--I don't even assume the JD Vance was simply mistaken and responding in a hurry when he got the basic details entirely wrong. 

JD Vance is a Yale Law grad and quite capable of seeing whether or not Kilmar Abrego Garcia was convicted of or merely accused of being a member of MS-13. It seems to me he counts on MAGA not reading, and only superficially noticing a lot of liberals telling Vance he's wrong (which he is) and assuming they are "triggered."

The Human Backdrop/ UPDATED

 

Kristi Noem, who has approached her job as head of DHS with what one might call "theatrical flair", made a video in an El Salvador prison. Keeping in mind that we are sending people into conditions like those behind her without due process--for reasons which the Trump Administration now alleges is a state secret. 

MAGA probably see the use of the human backdrop behind Noem a bit differently than I do. There is a gulf between seeing people being dehumanized and seeing them as not human. Someone like Noem does not grasp that difference. I wish more people in this country did. 

I like to point out that these MAGA airheads are inept, but they are also, nonetheless, fairly horrific. 

UPDATE: Just as a small clarification, if you go to her video on Twitter, the app formerly known as X, you can see this backdrop is actually a green screen with a looped video. The optics of dehumanization are very deliberate. 

UPDATE: That's a nice bit of hardware our girl has on her wrist--allegedly a $60K Rollie. I don't know what she paid for it or even that she DID pay for it (or how), but I just want to personally say I wouldn't wear my very nicest watch to the prison tour, so I'm guessing she must have nicer ones at home. 

Nothing We Didn't Know

I guess I've been a little derelict in my blogging the past several days in what should have been, for me, a "target-rich environment" for blogging opportunities. But, I must confess, I am almost bored with the surfeit of nonsense that is the Trump experience. If Trump has been explicitly racist in his policies and denies temporary protected status to people of El Salvador,  or says that all Haitians have AIDS and fails to understand the US shitty behavior to our neighbor, and denies these immigrants continued TPS status as well, and also treats all of the continent of Africa as if they are people in huts, we already know what he is. We could have known exactly what he was when he was denying apartments to "colored people" in the 1970's. We knew what he was when he was agitating against the Central Park Five in the 1980's (and later!).  There are only so many ways I know to phrase, once again, the central and overwhelming problem I have with a Trump presidency--his utter lack of qualification to serve as the head of a diverse nation and to represent us in front of a diverse international community. 

So, the disgraceful comments that Trump is alleged to have said with respects to calling Haiti and El Salvador and the African countries from which new Americans hope to come, don't surprise me, and I am mostly disgusted by the idea that there even should be an argument about what he meant based on whether he said "shithole" countries or "shithouse". The jist is the same. Senators Perdue and Cotton might feel fine temporarily assuming they did not hear what he said, and then pretending they heard no "shithole commentary". But we can all know very well what the White House immigration policy is, and in the meanwhile, Senator Graham knows what he knows, and the word is Trump even bragged to friends about dropping that nasty "shithole" statement about whole countries of people.  

He said this about millions of human beings, all equal in dignity to himself, all endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. He said this. There should not be a mistake in pretending that this is not either anything he would have said or historically proved himself to believe. 

The very worst thing he could think to say about his predecessor was that he might be born in Kenya. The people who voted for Trump don't understand what an international boob his comments make him seem.   

But this isn't new news. Trump is a racist--big whoop. The main argument shouldn't be "shithole" vs "shithouse" but whether his policies are unconstitutional and also really bad in outcomes and how they represent the US. It's as silly as getting bogged down in whether Trump said he did have a great relationship with China and North Korea, or would have a great relationship based on a barely aspirated "d". (During an interview where Trump rambled and seemed uninformed and more than a little ridiculous for several letters, words, whole paragraphs-worth.) How stupid! Trump easily thinks anyone could be his friend if they only figured out how to suck up to him properly. It's like his hopes for a great relationship with Putin. Trump is a man who believes people like him despite his money and power because they survive his temperamental trials by bullshit, and thinks he isn't either surrounded by "yes men" because all his employees assure him he isn't. He is a stooge.

And he also has a certain inoculation against the recent surfacing of claims that he is profoundly sexually immoral--being that the evangelicals have accepted him as their boy even though this kind of thing  is basically Trump's life story. Which tells us a whole lot more about the morals of evangelicals than it does about Trump. 

They rather his racism no matter what their ministries say about human dignity if he supports their notions of sexual prudery if he'd only appoint judges who are prudery-compliant. Which I find revolting but I will suffice to let them do themselves until they are chafed, if that is what they prefer.  My only concern is they should not get to make laws for people who aren't quite so morally fucked.