The Puppet Doctrine: How Stephen Miller Rewrote a Supreme Court Loss into a Trump Victory

A Reagan judge just warned the rule of law is collapsing but Trump won’t admit defeat. With the courts unified and defiance growing, one unelected aide is scripting the legal fantasy of a dictatorship

For days now, Stephen Miller and Trump surrogates have been claiming the Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favor in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

That’s a lie.

Now, a three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, including a Reagan appointee, has issued a scathing ruling that not only reaffirms what the Supreme Court actually said, but warns of a looming constitutional crisis.

Here’s what’s real:

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Trump administration must:

“facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent there.”

The Fourth Circuit just added:

“This is not a confusing case... The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process... That is the foundation of our constitutional order.”

The ruling denied Trump’s emergency appeal and warned:

“Facilitation does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country a withholding order forbids... It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness.”

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan conservative, made it clear this is about the rule of law and the executive branch’s open defiance of it.

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens?”

“The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts. But over time, history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been and law, in time, will sign its epitaph.”

This is a constitutional emergency in plain sight. And no amount of spin from Stephen Miller will erase the fact that two federal courts, and the highest court in the land, have now ordered Trump to comply.