I don’t think you fully grasp the situation. You still seem to think that there are consequences for Trump when he breaks the law, and that the legal system in the US is still in-tact enough to grant you not only your freedom, but some compensation for your rights being trampled.

Yes, it is outrageously illegal for him to abduct Americans and send them to a black site on foreign soil with no due process. But he spent his entire last term positioning himself to be able to do and get away with outrageously illegal things this time around. He controls the department of justice and the supreme court. The supreme court has already given him an incredibly wide blanket for presidential immunity.

You might think “well, that’s ok - as soon as the story gets out, people will be rioting in the streets!”, but you have to remember that “independent media” is a thing that doesn’t really exist anymore. All of the major news sources in print and on television are owned by a small handful of billionaires, and he is very good at keeping billionaires on side. Any information that gets out there will be downplayed immediately, and the news will be forgotten in a couple of days to be replaced by the latest shocking celebrity news or the latest atrocity Trump has committed.

You probably would get out eventually (provided you don’t get sick and die or get beat to death by the guards or shanked or something), but you would be far, far worse off for the experience. The dream of vindication you’d get for sticking it to Trump would vanish like mist in the sun and you’d be left with the heart-wrenching reality that the life you had previously known is over, and you are at the mercy of the barbarians now.

The last time I came through American customs, it was when I was returning from a conference in Spain, and a colleague of mine got detained for 3 hours because he “looked suspicious”. Man’s a fucking engineer, with credentials out the wazoo, but apparently he fidgeted in line or something. Sitting there in the little space available just anxiously waiting for them to release him was harrowing, but I can’t even imagine what he went through. Nobody would tell me shit; in fact, the more I asked about him, the more it felt like they were treating me like a suspect. If they’d ended up deciding that he didn’t pass the sniff test, they could have taken him anywhere, and nobody would know a fucking thing about it for God knows how long.

Man, I’m getting sweaty just reliving that. Fuck I hate this country sometimes.

I haven’t done any international travel for the last few years, but I used to do it a decent amount for work, and lemme tell you: the worst part of those trips wasn’t the long / cramped plane flights; it was going through US customs.

I’m a US citizen, but every time I went through those lines, it felt like I was passing through a military checkpoint into occupied territory. Every time I went through that experience, it made me hate what our country has become just that little bit more.

I dunno, man. Seems like a leap to believe he’s doing it for cynical, shady business reasons when the far more likely explanation is just that he’s a stupid cunt.