In the latest example
of deliberate lawlessness, it seems that the Trump administration has wilfully ignored
a judge’s order to turn back flights carrying deportees to El Salvador, even to
the extent that another flight took off after the judge had issued his ruling.
The legal arguments about written vs verbal orders and the limits of judicial
competence, to say nothing of the use of wartime powers in peacetime, will
continue to play out in the US courts. Those of us without legal expertise are
not well-placed to forecast the eventual outcome, although Trump’s record of
losing court cases is impressive. The actions of his administration are
unusual, in that the normal response to a court ruling in any country where the
rule of law is held to be important is to obey the ruling whilst appealing it,
rather than make up excuses to ignore it.
In an unrelated
incident last week, Musk posted an ill-conceived
tweet in which he argued that Hitler, Stalin and Mao killed no-one – the killings
were all carried out by public servants. It appears to have been some sort of
attempt to justify mass sackings of civil servants, although ‘insensitive’ is a
wholly inadequate word to describe that. Technically, however, Musk was correct
– the physical killings were carried out by those given the orders rather than
by those issuing the orders. The Nuremberg trials fairly comprehensively demolished
the argument that ‘only following orders’ was an acceptable excuse, and found
that those executing the orders also bore individual responsibility for their
actions.
That brings me back to those deportation flights. The orders may have come from the White House, but the actual deportations were carried out by individual public officials and law enforcement officers. Maybe the pilots and airport staff who facilitated the flights also bear some responsibility. They are, of course, effectively immune from prosecution whilst His Orangeness reigns in the White House, but such immunity may not live for long after that. Perhaps they assume – as Trump increasingly seems to be doing – that the regime will never come to an end: cancelling elections starts to look like a mere misdemeanour rather than a felony after his actions so far. But I do wonder how much thought they’ve given to the potential consequences of their own actions should democracy and the rule of law ever be restored in the US. But then, I suppose that another lesson from Nuremberg was about how easy it is for ordinary people to get caught up in a belief that what they are doing is normal. And with Labour's continuing assault on the most vulnerable in society, it might not only be the US forgetting that particular lesson.
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