This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you see as the positive and negative of Sen. Chris Van Hollen meeting with “mistakenly” deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia today, 4/17 in El Salvador?”

Both the positive and the negative are that he met with him and provided photographic proof of life.

It’s a positive that he is still alive, and his family, along with the nation, can hang onto some hope that this will be resolved and that he will return home.

For this very same reason, it is a negative because it means Donald Trump’s criminal presidency will have pushed tolerance for the intolerable a little bit more.

Unless he is stopped, he will continue to push boundaries until nothing can stop the floodgates of a citizenry pushed past its breaking point.

He still has almost four years to cause a systemic collapse, enabling him to enact a coup to maintain a permanent lock on power.

Everything he is doing now is the equivalent of a predator (gaslighting), stressing out their prey and pushing them past the point of clarity of reason to manipulate them into a vulnerable enough position to achieve an ineffectually defended subjugation.

He is creating divisions that will oppose one another when it is time to mobilize and strike.

This term in his presidency is dramatically different from his first term because he’s had enough of a break in between to develop a coherent destruction strategy.

Unlike his first term, where he was enamoured by the novelty of power, this time around, he appears very focused on pushing the nation and the globe into an entirely new dynamic.

It’s easy to write him off as being too incompetent to pull off a strategic shift in the global balance of power, but he’s not quite so alone nor quite so surrounded by people who would keep him in line.

This time, the sheer nastiness of his enablers goes well beyond the casual cruelty of his previous support staff.

Comparing Attorney Generals, for example, is the difference between day and night. Bill Barr was a naive loyalist, while Pam Bondi is an incredibly cruel and psychopathic caricature of a human being.

The bull-in-a-china-shop antics of clumsy catering to fleeting whims in his first term have been supplanted by a strategically maximized form of tactical destruction.

After stressing out over whether or not Garcia was still alive and questioning if he was being withheld from public view out of fear that he was no longer among the living, it appears calculated to achieve a maximum stress effect.

The same appears to be the case with the tariffs.

This is what a predator does in an abusive relationship by tweaking emotions to their extremes and burning out their prey by forcing them to exist in a persistent state of fight or flight to normalize an existence of high levels of anxiety.