3 Dead in 7 Days, and the President Says: Keep Going! - He Will Not Have the Last Word

Less than 24 hours separated the third death from the order to carry on as if nothing had happened. On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement suspended its traffic stops. By midday Wednesday, the president reversed that decision with a message on social media that received 21,700 likes.

The men and women of the agency were doing a great job, he wrote, a job that had to be done. Crime in America had dropped dramatically, in some cases to levels not seen in decades. Joe Biden's open border policy had allowed 25 million people to pour into the country without checks or screening, many of them criminals who now had to be removed. That required strength and intelligence, which was why the agency could never give up one of its most important and effective tools - the traffic stop. Giving it up, he said, would play right into the hands of criminals. He ended by thanking everyone for their attention to the matter.

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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the father of three children who had lived in Houston for more than three decades, died behind the wheel while driving his crew to a construction site. The agency claims he tried to ram federal agents, something the men sitting next to him in the vehicle dispute. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25 years old according to the official determination by the Maine Attorney General's Office after journalists and the Colombian Embassy pointed it out, died at an intersection in Biddeford. His three-year-old daughter was sitting beside him. In Florida, another man fleeing from immigration agents ended up beneath a tractor trailer after they encountered him at a gas station. No shots were fired there, but another man was dead. That investigation is still ongoing because authorities in Florida are, as always, making things especially difficult.

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What this president, who is unworthy of the office he holds, expects from his agency is spelled out in that very same message, and it is written there without the slightest attempt to hide it. He wants them to keep producing those crime statistics. Not justice. Not public safety. Statistics.

This is exactly how those numbers are produced, and the agents themselves admitted it after the traffic stops were suspended. Their arrest numbers, people inside the agency worried, would collapse because the overwhelming majority of arrests came from traffic stops. That would leave only courthouse arrests, transfers from local jails, scheduled check-ins, or so-called consensual encounters during patrols. Then came the sentence that explains the entire system: Vehicles are preferred over homes because entering a residence requires a judicial warrant, while people can be seized in public without one.

Traffic stops are, in fact, this agency's most important tool - but not because they fight crime. They replace the judge.

When people are pulled from moving vehicles instead of having officers knock on their front door, the Fourth Amendment is being bypassed - the constitutional protection that has shielded Americans from government intrusion without a warrant since 1791. That is why people are dying in the street instead of inside their homes. The place where they die is not an accident. It is a legal decision.

Étienne de La Boétie, Montaigne's close friend, wrote his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude at the age of eighteen, and to this day no one has truly disproved it. A tyrant possesses no power except the power people hand to him. He has no more hands than anyone else, no more eyes, no second life. Everything that keeps him standing comes from the very people he rules, and they can reclaim it whenever they choose. They do not have to overthrow him. They simply have to stop supporting him.

That thought explains the number hanging over everything else. Trump's approval rating averages about 35 percent. Two-thirds of the country do not support him, and yet he remains in power. Political scientists call this an intense personality cult or charismatic leader attachment, where loyalty to the individual outweighs every decision and every result. Historians compare certain characteristics: presenting the leader as an extraordinary, almost infallible figure, followers remaining loyal even in the face of obvious contradictions, critics being recast as enemies, and loyalty shifting from the institutions of the state to a single individual. Those same elements existed under Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, just as they did under Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il Sung, which is why historians examine them comparatively. There is no need to equate them. It is enough to recognize the pattern.

The president provides the next part of that pattern himself. The Radical Left, he wrote, deliberately misspelling the name of the Democratic Party, wanted to end traffic stops, but that would never happen under his watch. His agents should remain judicious, fair, and smart and return to their very important work. They were loved and respected in America. One day earlier, hundreds of people stood outside an immigration detention center in Scarborough, Maine, holding signs demanding an end to the killing.

On Tuesday, that same president published a second message that belongs right beside the first. Todd Blanche was doing a phenomenal job as Acting Attorney General. Under his incredible leadership, the murder rate had fallen to its lowest level since 1900, the biggest one-year decline in recorded history. Arrests for violent crime were up 100 percent. Robberies, carjackings, and assaults were collapsing. More than 500 million deadly doses of drugs had been seized, saving countless innocent lives. That, he wrote, is what happens when law and order are unleashed instead of protecting vicious criminal thugs. 34,800 likes.

Both messages together create an impossibility. If the murder rate really is at its lowest level since 1900 - a claim that is completely detached from reality - then nobody needs to be dragged out of a car in the middle of the street. If traffic stops are truly indispensable, then the country is not safe. Claiming both at the same time is not politics. It is the abandonment of any logical connection between two sentences written by the same person. And if arrests are suddenly up 100 percent while crime is supposedly collapsing, that does not describe a crime problem. It describes a policing strategy. You can arrest as many people as you want in an empty room. It will not make that room any safer.

Trump is not exactly the brightest candle on the Oval Office cake, because...

Put those two statements side by side and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. If the president insists crime is at a historic low, then why would traffic stops still be one of the most important and effective crime-fighting tools in the country? If America is truly as safe as he claims, there is no need for confrontations that end in bloodshed on public streets. If those traffic stops are indispensable, then they do not fit the picture of a nation supposedly enjoying historically low crime. And if arrests keep climbing while crime keeps falling, that primarily reflects an expansion of government enforcement, not automatically an increase in public safety.

That praise came the evening before the hearing in which a Republican senator walked the man receiving it through how he had granted the president immunity from IRS audits.

CORNYN: "The president, who is a plaintiff in this lawsuit, has not agreed in writing to eliminate the Anti-Weaponization Fund. So there is no guarantee that he or one of the other plaintiffs could not later raise that issue in a breach-of-contract lawsuit, correct?" Anti-Weaponization Fund nicht schriftlich zugestimmt. Es gibt also keine Garantie, dass er oder einer der anderen Kläger diese Frage nicht später im Rahmen einer Klage wegen Vertragsbruchs wieder aufwerfen könnte, oder?“

BLANCHE: "I suppose they could bring a lawsuit."

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On Wednesday, Trump appeared at a Defense and Innovation Summit in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he announced his next initiative. His administration, he said, would soon take historic action against illegal truck drivers who were killing a lot of people. They could not read road signs, many of them were under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and they should not be behind the wheel of those rigs. They had entered the country illegally, he said, and they were not wanted. They would be replaced by proud American veterans, who would be taught everything they needed to know about driving trucks. Anyone who had driven trucks in the military would automatically qualify for a commercial driver's license. Left-wing politicians opposed the plan, he added, but that did not matter because his administration was the one running the country.

Trump claimed that illegal truck drivers were "killing a lot of people." He said his administration would soon take historic action. They would be replaced by proud American military veterans. The government, he said, would train veterans and teach them how to drive trucks. At the same time, he claimed that many foreign truck drivers could not read traffic signs and were under the influence of drugs or alcohol. After statements like these, the question of whether this president is still fit for office becomes impossible to avoid. And the answer is: "No." Bei solchen Aussagen drängt sich die Frage auf, ob dieser Präsident überhaupt noch amtsfähig ist. Und die Antwort darauf lautet: „Nein“

The reason for the announcement goes back two weeks and has a name: Michael Pahira Jr., a police officer from Pennsylvania who was struck and killed by a tractor trailer. The driver, Michael Bon, now faces charges of vehicular manslaughter, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement lodged a detainer the day after his arrest. One death became a policy, and that policy has been in motion since March, when roughly 200,000 immigrants lost their commercial driver's licenses. Every one of them had passed the required exams. Every one of them had met the legal standards. They did not lose those licenses because they were unqualified. They lost them because of where they came from.

What is supposed to replace them is the real scandal. To this day, no one has explained how military driving experience is supposed to replace a civilian commercial trucking qualification. Someone who drove an armored transport vehicle in Afghanistan does not automatically know how to haul hazardous materials down an American interstate or comply with federal hours-of-service regulations. The president who claims immigrants cannot read road signs is now putting untested drivers behind the wheel of 40-ton trucks with the stroke of a pen. A program justified by one traffic death creates the very danger it claims to prevent. And if someone is killed next year by a truck driven by a veteran who never completed the proper civilian certification, there will be no headline in giant capital letters.

That brings us back to La Boétie's question from the sixteenth century - the one no one in this country seems able to answer. Why do they keep supporting him? Thirty-five percent approval. Defeats in court. An agency that had already pulled the emergency brake on its own. And yet one single message is enough to make it reverse course again. It is not strength that keeps this man in power. It is the number of hands still holding him up. The moment those hands let go, everyone will see what is left.

Our investigations into this week's cases are continuing and are far from over. We will do everything in our power to make sure Immigration and Customs Enforcement remains under tighter restrictions. Legal action and emergency motions are already underway in multiple jurisdictions. One of our teams remains in Florida while we continue reporting on the ground in Biddeford and Washington. America is being governed by a man whose messages have to be read word for word to understand what he is really announcing. And the rest of the world continues to shake his hand.

To be continued ...