Will Trump's Deportation Betrayal be his Waterloo?

I wrote this yesterday... submitted it about 2:00 PM and it was set for publication today... Sometime last night the administration reversed this insane policy.  Sadly, as it's now moot the piece is not being published so it's here nonetheless!

Just south of Paris is the royal chateau of Fontainebleau. Housed within its walls is a museum which chronicles exploits of one of the greatest military minds in human history, Napoleon Bonaparte.  One of the most fascinating elements of the museum is a hall that features busts and paintings of his various siblings and their spouses. The hall is more than just a 3D family portrait, it’s a timeline. 

Over the course of just over a decade, Napoleon would expand French power across Europe, creating an empire that stretched from Spain to the borders of Russia. Seeking to leave people he could trust to in control of the places he conquered, Napoleon would appoint one of his many siblings as the king or ruler.  He made his older brother Joseph the King of Naples and then of Spain while he made his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy.  These and others are in the museum.

Napoleon took power in 1799 and crowned himself Emperor in 1804 and by 1811, after almost nonstop war, Napoleon had most of Europe under his control. But it wouldn’t last.

Why? Hubris. With Europe essentially at his feet, rather than regrouping and reinforcing his gains, Napoleon instead chose to annex the Duchy of Oldenburg, an area in today’s Germany. That annexation was the proximate cause of a new conflict with Russia and in late 1812 Napoleon would head to Moscow at the head of 600,000 troops.

To say it would go badly is something of an understatement.  The Russians, understanding history and Russian winters, would implement a tactical retreat strategy coupled with a scorched earth policy that would see them set fire to Moscow once Napoleon arrived.  This strategy made it impossible for Napoleon’s men to survive off the land as they pursued their prey. 

As such, tired, hungry, frozen and demoralized, Napoleon’s troops would retreat after only six weeks. Eventually Napoleon would abandon his 75,000 remaining troops and return to Paris.  As his enemies gained momentum the French empire crumbled over the next 18 months and a defeated Napoleon would abdicate on April 6, 1814. 

He was imprisoned on Elba Island, off the coast of Italy.  Undeterred, he would escape and as soon as he landed back in France he would quickly win over the regiment sent to arrest him. The new king, Louis XVIII, fled Paris and Napoleon took control of the government and immediately raised an army.

It would all be for naught as Napoleon would misread the retreat of his Prussian enemy early in the battle at Waterloo and as a result the British Duke of Wellington would go down in history as the man who finally defeated Napoleon. 

While Waterloo was the final nail in his coffin, the reality is it was Moscow where Napoleon wasted the lives of half a million of his own men and set the course of his destruction. He had Europe in his grip, and rather than strengthen his position, he let hubris get the best of him and it destroyed him. 

Sound like anyone we know?

I’m of course talking about Donald Trump.  He came into office the second time with a strong wind at his back. Having endured 8 years of abuse at the hands of the anti-American Democrats and their swamp weasel comrades, he persevered and won a third election to the White House.  The GOP took back the Senate and held on to the House.  For the first time in four years the average Joe felt like they had a patriot in the White House, someone who was going to look out for them, was going to put the interests of Americans and American taxpayers ahead of the swamp and the rest of the world, was going to deport all those who crossed our border illegally and hold accountable the tyrants who had used the government as a jackboot over the previous four years. 

And to make things even better, in two months DOGE validated many people’s hunches that our government was funding the very entities who were doing so much damage to our country.

But a funny thing happened on the way to fixing the country…

President Trump allowed the swamp weasels in the Democrat party and the GOP leadership to write a treasonous spending bill that’s largely indistinguishable from one the Democrats would have written themselves. 

Then the GOP decides to basically disappear the DOGE recommendations for ending the trillion dollar waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. 

We see judges across the country using unconstitutional tactics to throw roadblocks in front of virtually every administration policy and the president plays by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, which is exactly what the swamp wants because it allows them to run out the clock on any reforms.

And of course we can’t forget that fully five months into this administration and no one has been held accountable for the persecution of the J6ers, the Russia Hoax, the COVID tyranny or the stolen election of 2020.  Not a one.

As bad as all of those things are, President Trump’s supporters have been willing to endure them for a while because he was busy focusing on the single most important issue:  Deporting illegal aliens.  With 30 million illegals in the country, there’s no greater threat today, and President Trump promised to deport them.

But last week he backtracked on mass deportations and is going to ease up on enforcement against illegals working in the hospitality industry and on farms to focus on “criminals”.  Well, the reality is, that’s how we got here in the first place, with illegals taking jobs on farms and in hotels. 

This is simply insane. We’re seeing the result of this betrayal on our streets right now:  The fires looting, riots and attacking of police officers. And what’s most stunning (but not surprising) is that across the country, people who don’t want to go back to Mexico are actually here in America flying Mexican flags while burning American flags and attacking American law enforcement. Guaranteed many of those in the streets are taking time from farms and restaurants to “protest”. Appeasement simply doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Reagan in 1986 and it won’t work today.

Much like the soldiers who flocked to Napoleon’s banner as he offered them a path out of the chaos and misery following the Revolution or upon his return from Elba, Trump’s supporters have been willing to take the slings and arrows of abuse because they believed in him and the promises of giving them back their country.

Napoleon betrayed his men by leaving more than a half a million of them laying bloody and dying on battlefields from Moscow to Waterloo. And in the end Napoleon’s hubris left behind a France that was economically broken, fiscally insolvent, occupied by her enemies and wracked with internal strife.

Donald Trump earned a 2^nd chance in the White House by promising to deport the millions of illegal aliens in our country. If he maintains this betrayal on deportations, the single most important issue to almost every one of his supporters, he might just find that they’re not willing to be cannon fodder just to indulge his hubris.  And that doesn’t bode well for 2026.

Decimation, Due Process & Deportations

Since the Enlightenment, the Anglosphere has had a laudable commitment to due process, which means opposing the brutality of group punishment. But what happens when that commitment leads to societal suicide? Our Founders cannot have intended this, especially regarding those people who ignored due process to enter America illegally.

In 73 BC seventy slaves escaped from a gladiator school in the town of Caupa, in central Italy.  They spent the next two years attacking various towns and encouraging slaves to revolt and join them. This was the beginning of the Third Servile War.

By 71 BC the force numbered 120,000, had at its head the former gladiator Spartacus, and had become a formidable force, defeating a number of Roman legions on the battlefield. It was then, with much of the peninsula living in abject fear of both the rebels and their own slaves, that the Senate appointed Marcus Licinius Crassus command. 

Crassus was a brutal commander and revived the ancient ritual of decimation.  Decimation is responsibility taken to an extreme, where one out of ten members of a group are killed by the other members as punishment, often for the group having lost a battle. While it’s unclear exactly why Crassus utilized decimation – he ordered the deaths of up to 4,000 men out of his force of almost 40,000 – the result is clear, his men feared him more than the enemy.  They defeated Spartacus, and crucified his last 6,000 men along the Appian Way.

That one in ten responsibility ratio has been a defining maxim of American law since before there was an America, although not in the same direction. In the middle of the 18th century William Blackstone released his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which became a core element of English and then later American law.

In Commentaries Blackstone draws on the Old Testament to turn Rome’s responsibility decimation on its head.  Blackstone’s Ratio stated "is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”  This maxim was picked up by Ben Franklin stating “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer…”

John Adams put it like this: “It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished.... when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever.”

With all due respect to Blackstone, et.al. I disagree.  My disagreement is perhaps best personified by my favorite quote, from Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

There is no system that is perfect, and while Blackstone said the ratio of good to bad should be 1 in 10, Franklin said it should be 1 in 100.  But both numbers are arbitrary.  How about 1 in 2 men, or 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 1,000,000. If not, why not? That maxim sounds noble and virtuous, but civil society cannot survive such a caveat.  While society and the government should do as much as it reasonably can in order to ensure that no innocent men are going to pay for a crime they did not commit, the reality is that no system operated by men is perfect.

Why does any of this matter today?  Because our Constitution is not a suicide pact. 

Over the last 4 years over 10 million illegal aliens invaded the country.  Over the previous 30 years another 20-30 million came.  In total, there approximately 35 million illegal aliens in the United States, and we finally have a president who’s decided to take on the Herculean / Sisyphean task of deporting them. 

And now that someone is trying to do something about the cancer of illegal immigration the left is throwing roadblocks in the way seemingly every other day. The rationales are varied, but a fundamental argument is “Due Process”.

Due Process is an important element of American history and jurisprudence, but like the Constitution, it’s not a suicide pact.

Thirty-five million illegal aliens is 10% of the American population. Judges across the country are telling the administration it must exercise Due Process before any of them can be deported. That is simply not feasible. Between scheduling court dates, conducting court cases and waiting on the appeals processes, there’s literally no way for the American judicial system to handle that number of cases. If each case could magically be fully adjudicated in just one day and the government could deport 10,000 people a day, it would take a full decade to deport all the illegals already here.  But they don’t take one day.  In most circumstances it takes months and often takes years. 

But we’re told that without Due Process it’s possible that someone legally here, or even an American citizen could be deported. And that’s true, it is possible. But is that a reason to not deport the 35 million illegals in the United States? No.

To say yes would be basically to treat the United States the way blue states treat homeowners victimized by squatters.  Across the country we hear horror stories of homeowners whose lives are turned upside down by squatters.  The owner not only loses access to or use of their homes but they’re still required to pay the mortgage, taxes and insurance.  This can go on for years.  And when the squatters finally leave – sometimes only after being paid to do so – the homeowners often find tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Such situations make anyone with a functioning brain see red with fury.  It’s simply insane.

Now multiply that exact scenario by 35 million and you have America’s illegal immigrant disaster.

Which brings us back to Blackwell and Adams. One wonders if they would suggest that it’s better that 35 million immigrants remain in America illegally than one citizen accidentally be deported. What if the number were 45 or 75 million, either of which would be possible after 4 or 8 more years of the next Democrat in the White House.  At what point does “Due Process” become “Accept the collapse of the Republic” because that’s exactly the position Democrats and swamp dwelling RINOs have put Trump and America in. 

Of course this is only an issue because activist judges across the country have overstepped their Constitutional powers and embraced nationwide injunctions as the vehicle for undermining Trump. 

I’ve advocated for the president to ignore the judges, but so far he’s chosen not to do so.  He is considering however a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, similar to what Lincoln did in 1861. As I read the Constitution it seems to my non-lawyer eyes that it’s Congress who can suspend the writ*, and perhaps he’s planning on asking them to do it. Of course there’s zero chance that that snake infested swamp will do so.  Or he could do as Lincoln did and suspend it unilaterally and then ignore SCOTUS.

I realize that doing so would open a Pandora’s Box of potential disasters from Democrats and RINO swamp weasels in DC, but if the leftists leave Trump no other options, is his job to sit by and watch the Republic collapse? I don’t think so.  But make no mistake, we're not here because Donald Trump is some sort of would be dictator.  We're here because Democrats have been attempting to decimate American exceptionalism for decades.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

*Note from Andrea, the brilliant editor of AT with point I find quite compelling: Vince is entirely correct that the accepted way of reading the power to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus is that it’s limited to Congress. The reasoning is that the permission to do so is contained in Article I, which establishes both Congress's powers and limitations.

However, one can argue that because the authority to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus is included in Section 9, Lincoln was correct to say that he, too, had the authority. That’s because there are clauses in Section 9 that clearly extend beyond Congress, such as the prohibition against Foreign Emoluments or the Ports Preference Clause. If these clauses do, and if the President is charged with being the Commander in Chief and front-line of national security, it makes sense that he would also have authority over the Writ of Habeas Corpus.