It’s the kind of politicization one imagines the most cravenly loyal Trump prosecutors to engage in, but you don’t expect it to be put in writing for an international news agency to report on it.

Emil Bove, then-acting DAG and now an appeals court judge, “told Justice Department officials he did not support the investigation,” MSNBC reported. Bove called it a “deep state” operation, and FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the probe closed over the summer, Reuters reported.

Trump’s brutalization of Abrego Garcia for having the temerity to challenge his wrongful removal to El Salvador– which the administration has conceded was a mistake – is a cruel face-saving move and a grotesque flex of executive power.

I'd hoped a week of marveling at geological time scales would make me more prone to see Donald Trump as a passing fad in the larger sweep of our political history. But I came back instead a bit more sensitive to how far we’ve fallen in such a short time.