Last month, President Donald Trump shared an edited image of the knuckles of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with protected status wrongfully sent to a Salvadoran detention facility. The photo showed "MS13" apparently added above his knuckle tattoos, even though other photos of his hand did not have that text. Last week, I had a chance to ask Homeland Security Security Kristi Noem if she had investigated how an edited image came into the president's hands. Not only did she refuse to answer, she barely acknowledged that the image was edited.
Politics is hyperbole. I know that voters have become inured to politicians saying, "The opposing party is the end of the country as we know it!" But what we are witnessing today is like nothing we have seen since the founding of this country, almost 250 years ago. Every warning light on democracy's dashboard now flashes red.
Since taking the Oval Office, Trump has never been coy about his ambitions to rule as a dictator rather than serve as a president, accountable to the people who put him there. In just the past few months, he's laid out the groundwork to jail innocent people and silence his political enemies, all under the guise of "law and order." Perhaps in just a few months, Trump's authoritarian ambitions will be realized. And it will be like how Hemingway described how one grows broke:
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
This is a preview of Rep. Eric Swalwell's latest column. Read the full column here.
