James Carville on Monday urged Democrats to continue going after Donald Trump as the president openly defies a Supreme Court order to return a Maryland man to the U.S. that officials wrongly deported to an El Salvador prison.
“Sometimes you got to fight on two fronts,” said the longtime Democratic strategist when asked by CNN’s John Berman whether the Trump administration would rather have a fight against the deportation than one targeting the president’s tariffs and “wild swings” in the markets.
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He continued, “You can fight on the economic front but also this is such an egregious trespass of justice that you just can’t say, ‘Well, we’ll just pass for a higher ground and talk about egg prices and forget about this guy,’ well I’m not for that.”
Carville, who called on Democrats to take back the “economic narrative” from the GOP earlier in the day in a New York Times op-ed, tore apart the president after his Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Trump officials insisted they wouldn’t bring the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, back to America. Bukele referred to a question on whether he planned to return the man as “preposterous” and portrayed him to be a “terrorist.”
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Carville told Berman that Trump officials tuning out court orders marks the “very essence of a constitutional crisis.”
“This is not something that’s a minor thing where you just ignore a court order and this tinhorn is coming in here in the White House and refusing to pay attention to a legitimate order issued by American courts,” Carville said.
“This is not going to end well unless somebody gets this guy back in this country where he belongs and he’s done nothing to be in a prison anywhere and it’s a real shame.”
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Carville later added that the Trump administration has made an “offense against a nation.”
“It’s an offense against the Constitution, it’s an offense against order. You just can’t let this go. I’m sorry, it might not be the most politically productive thing in the world but sometimes you got to just get a backbone and take a stand,” he said.
