Stephen Miller

The Silence of the Republicans

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 12, 2025

The biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans. They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.

This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: ​​“Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”

It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach. As Steve Vladeck noted on Friday in One First, there is “near-universal consensus…that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.” In addition, Miller’s insistence that it would be appropriate to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the United States is under attack—a position Trump echoed yesterday when he posted, “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order”—has failed repeatedly in court.

Reality will trip up Trump’s plan to take possession of the Qatari gift. As David Kurtz noted this morning in Talking Points Memo, retrofitting the luxury plane with the defense capabilities and security protections necessary for Air Force One will take years, not months. (Air Force One is not a specific airplane; it is the call sign given to any Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States).

Still, the Republicans’ silence matters. Whether Trump’s plans are all possible is not the point: he and the members of his administration are deliberately attacking the fundamental principles of our democratic republic. That lawmakers who swore an oath to uphold those principles are choosing to remain silent makes them complicit in that attack.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves. They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders. “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” they wrote in the Constitution. An emolument is a payment.

Until the Trump administration, the expectation was that presidents would not accept foreign gifts, let alone bribes. As Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian explained today, U.S. law prohibits presidents from accepting gifts worth more than $480. Gifts worth more than that are considered a gift to the American people and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the same agency that oversees presidential libraries. President George W. Bush gave up a puppy that was a gift from the leader of Bulgaria. When he left office after his first term, experts estimate, Trump retained more than $250,000 worth of gifts.

Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, signed off on Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari jet. They concluded it was an acceptable gift because while it will be exclusively for Trump’s use, the “flying palace” will be transferred from the Qataris to the U.S. Air Force and then to Trump’s presidential library, and that it is not tied to a specific presidential act. In 2019, Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Qatar, earning $115,000 a month.

In defending his planned acceptance of the plane, Trump turned the emoluments clause on its head. That, in turn, turned on its head the idea of a democratic republic in which the government rejects the idea of foreign leaders colluding for their own profit and reached back to that world the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected.

He posted: “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

In The Bulwark, William Kristol observed: This is the voice of old-world autocracy…. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.”

This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.

The Trump family’s connections to Qatar are longstanding. In 2022 the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”

Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter and was a key presidential advisor in Trump’s first term. The letter explained that Qatar had repeatedly refused to bail out the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) in 2018. But after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.

Wyden and Maloney noted that “[t]he economic blockade of Qatar may have been used as leverage for the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout and was not supported by other officials, including the Secretaries of State and Defense.” They warned that Kushner “may have prioritized his own financial interests over the national interest. The pursuit of personal financial gain should not dictate U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies.”

In this administration the corruption is even more direct. On May 1, 2025, the Trump Organization cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.

Trump heads to the Middle East tomorrow to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—three of the world’s wealthiest nations—in search of business deals.

Republicans spent the four years of Democratic president Joe Biden’s term calling to impeach him for allegedly accepting a $5 million payment from Ukraine. The source for that story later admitted to making it up and pleaded guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet the Republicans are silent now.

After the weekend, Monday started with the administration’s announcement that it has agreed to a 90-day pause in the 145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods and on the 125% tariffs China imposed in retaliation. Both nations will cut tariffs 115% during that period, bringing the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and the Chinese counter tariffs to 10%. The stock market rose at the news.

While the administration hailed this as a breakthrough agreement, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out, this wasn’t a case of China backing down. China’s tariffs were a response to Trump’s, which threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated Trump wanted a way out, China agreed. Quietly scraped into the memory hole is Trump’s insistence that his high tariffs would bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States.

Still, Krugman notes, a tariff of 30% on goods from China is still “really, really high.” Combined with the 10% across-the-board tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from other countries, Krugman estimates that the average tariff is up about 10% since Trump took office, from about 3% to about 13%. Krugman also notes that the tariffs have only been paused, making economic uncertainty worse. Trump appears to relish uncertainty because it keeps attention glued on him. Such uncertainty is good for television ratings but terrible for the economy, as executives cannot plan for the future.

Today Helene Cooper, Greg Jaffe, Jonathan Swan, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump followed a similar pattern in his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. He thought he could stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthis, and he expected results within 30 days.

After 31 days, the journalists report, the U.S. didn’t even have air superiority over the Houthis, who shot down seven U.S. drones—each of which cost about $30 million—and continued to fire at U.S. ships. In the first month, the U.S. campaign cost about $1 billion and lost two $67 million aircraft. Eager to get out, Trump agreed to stop the bombing campaign in return for the Houthis’ leaving U.S. ships alone, but without any promises from the Houthis to stop the more general attacks that had led Trump to start the U.S. strikes in the first place. On May 5, Trump ended the operations and declared victory.

For their part, the Houthis posted on social media: “Yemen defeats America.”

State Terror: A brief guide for Americans

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By Timothy Snyder 4/15/2025

Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.

This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.

So let’s begin with language, because language is very important. When the state carries out criminal terror against its own people, it calls them the “criminals” or the the “terrorists.” During the 1930s, this was the normal practice. Looking back, we refer to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” but at the time it was the Stalinists who controlled the language. Today in Berlin stands an important museum called “Topography of Terror”; during the era it documents, it was the Jews and the chosen enemies of the regime who were called “terrorists.” Yesterday in the White House, the Salvadoran president showed the way, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “terrorist” without any basis whatsoever. The Americans treated him as a criminal, even though he was charged with no crime.

The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its victims are the “criminals” and the “terrorists.” The second part is deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror. This was the role Stephen Miller played when he said yesterday in the White House that reporters “want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.”

The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order. Our rule of law begins with notions such as the people and their rights. If politicians shift the framework to “criminals” and “terrorism,” then they are shifting the purpose of the state.

In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws.

Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by “legal” what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.

It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse. State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law. What aspiring tyrants present as “strength,” the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us.

In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness.

The leader principle, or in German Führerprinzip, is the idea that a single individual directly represents the people, and that therefore all of his actions are by definition legal and proper. In discussions in the White House and thereafter, we see this notion being advanced. Trump’s advisors claim that what he is doing is popular. The claim (as in legal filings) that the president is acting from a personal “mandate” from the people has the same problem. Asked on Fox News about the abduction of Americans and their transfer to foreign gulags, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country.” If it comes down to what “he is saying,” then he is a dictator and the U.S. is a dictatorship. Trump spoke of the need to deport people who “hate our country” or who are “stupid.”

The second escape from law is the state of exception. In principle, the Soviet Union was governed by law. Before its greatest exercises of terror, however, the Soviet authorities declared for themselves states of exception. This meant that, on the territory of the Soviet Union itself, it was “legal” (in Bondi’s and in Trump’s sense) to abduct people and send them to concentration camps: authorities claimed that there was some sort of threat, and so protections could be withdrawn and procedures set aside. People could be abducted in black vans and executed or sent to a camp, “legally,” in the sense that the law had been set aside. The notion of the state of exception, important to Soviet practice, was at the center of Nazi theory. As the leading Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt argued, the sovereign is the person who can make an exception. If we are living in normal times, then we think we should be governed by law. But if politicians can use words to make us think that these are exceptional times, then we might accept their lawlessness.

A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one’s own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.

This exploitation of purported stateless zones was the main line of the history of the Holocaust. Under Hitler, the Germans did have concentration camps on their own territory, and they did reduce Jews to second-class citizenship, and they did live under a permanent state of exception. But, in the main, the mass murder of German Jews was achieved by their abduction and forced rendition to sites beyond prewar German territory where, German authorities claimed, there was no law.

A probing of this statelessness approach was on display yesterday, as Trump and his advisors claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of the United States whom US authorities abducted by mistake and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador, was now beyond the reach of American law. This is state terror: the state is presented as “strong” in its oppression of a person, but as weak in its ability to respect or enforce law. The idea that the United States can send you to places from which it cannot bring you back is the theoretical basis for a doctrine of statelessness. Call it the Rubio Doctrine: in the words of the secretary of state, “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.” But what that implies is that people forcibly transported beyond the boundaries of the United States can be incarcerated or killed for no reason. That would be “foreign policy.”

Will citizenship save people? Obviously it is better to be a citizen than not. Citizenship provides some protection, at least by comparison with its absence, or with statelessness. The problem, though, is that citizens can find themselves borne along with the rationales applied to non-citizens. If we accept that Trump exercises power because of the Führerprinzip, then what is to stop him from saying that the people want to see the forcible rendition of “homegrowns,” of “really bad people, every bit as bad as the ones coming in.” If citizens accept that we are living in a state of exception, then they are also accepting that they too can be treated exceptionally. Perhaps worst of all, if citizens accept the notion of stateless zones, of law that only functions as the servant of power, they are inviting their own deportation to places from which we will never return.

If citizens endorse the idea that people named by authorities as “criminals” or “terrorists” have no right to due process, then they are accepting that they themselves have no right to due process. It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen. Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you.

Horrible though all of this is, it is still state terror in outline, a test of how Americans will react. We can react by seeing all of this for what it is, and naming it by name: incipient state terror. We can react by associating ourselves with others are repressed before we are. Only in solidarity do we affirm law. We can remind the other branches of government that their functions are being taken over by the executive. Citizens cannot do this alone; they have to remind the rest of the government of its constitutional functions.

The president is claiming core congressional responsibilities when he asserts personal control of immigration policy, criminal law, and the funding of forcible renditions. Congress could very easily pass laws, if a few Republicans found the courage. The president is claiming core judicial functions when he defines himself as judge, jury, and, in the case for forcible renditions to El Salvador, de facto executioner. The phrase “contempt of court” took on vivid life in the White House yesterday.

Even these most basic institutions, the ones defined by our Constitution, do not act on their own. To a very sad degree, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress are already complicit in this experiment in state terror. They might find their way back to an America in which their offices have meaning, but only with the help of we the people.

© 2025 Timothy Snyder
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