‘Threat to Republic’: Analyst warns Trump move ‘totally different scale’ than other crimes
Hamza Adam 
President Donald Trump has lost no time since taking office in disappearing immigrants into an infamous Salvadoran megaprison with little to no due process — and it’s time for Democrats to confront him head-on before he ramps up efforts to do the same to U.S. citizens, Jonathan Chait wrote for The Atlantic on Wednesday.
Indeed, he continued, far from backing down and conceding as Democrats did on the issue shortly after Trump was elected, they should press the offense.
“The case for doing nothing is as follows,” wrote Chait. “Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, according to polls. The more Democrats holler about Trump’s immigration policy, the more the public judges Trump based on how he handles it, as opposed to other issues on which he’s much less popular … Staying quiet on deportation, by contrast, means people will hear more about Trump’s trade war, the various unsecured chats on which his advisers have discussed secret military operations, and other stories that make Trump look bad.”
Then, as Trump becomes unpopular on that basis, MAGA-skeptical Republicans and courts will be more emboldened to challenge him, including on immigration issues.
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This ultimately doesn’t hold water as an argument, Chait continued.
For one thing, he wrote, “Several recent polls find Trump’s approval on the issue slipping below the level of disapproval. More pertinent, that support collapses when it meets almost any specific application of his agenda … Deporting immigrants who have not broken any laws other than immigration laws, deporting illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for more than a decade, and deporting people without due process are all deeply unpopular.”
And the conservative elite, sensing this, have already started to distance themselves from Trump on immigration, Chait continued.
“Conservative organs such as The Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review have editorialized against his disregard for due process. The Free Press, another conservative outlet, surveyed seven legal experts, all of whom criticized Trump’s actions.”
Finally, he argued, there’s the fact that polls sometimes just need to take a backseat to fighting for who we are as a nation.
“These are abnormal times,” Chait concluded. “Trump is attempting to open a loophole in the Constitution that would let him jail any person, criminal or not, citizen or not, in an overseas prison without recourse to American law. This poses a threat to the republic on a totally different scale than almost any other Trump crime.”