What did Donald Trump do today?

He pretended he wasn't personally dictating what the Justice Department did.

Last March, the Trump administration illegally, and by its own admission accidentally, deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran prison camp. When ordered by the Supreme Court to secure Abrego Garcia's release from the notoriously brutal prison, the Trump administration pretended it had no control over what the Salvadoran government did, even though the United States was paying El Salvador to keep Abrego Garcia and hundreds of other deportees there.

On Friday, Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States, on the pretext that he was wanted for crimes committed here. (Abrego Garcia was a legal resident of Maryland prior to his deportation.) Trump did not explain why he was suddenly not helpless to compel El Salvador to return him, and the consensus view is that the administration decided that open defiance of the Supreme Court was not to its immediate advantage. One federal judge was already investigating what—if anything—Trump had been doing to attempt to comply with the Supreme Court's order.

But when asked about it today, Trump insisted he was out of the loop, and that the Justice Department had acted on its own. "This wasn't my decision," Trump told an NBC News reporter. "The Department of Justice decided to do it that way."

Normally, there is a strong firewall between the President and the DOJ, so much so that attorneys general and presidents rarely speak during their term in office. Even mild, accidental breaches of that protocol are treated as significant events under normal circumstances: it was a national scandal when former President Bill Clinton chatted briefly with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016, and Trump himself seized on it as evidence of a conspiracy against him.

But Trump has overtly weaponized the justice system. The top three officials at the DOJ were his personal lawyers. He's pardoned people who committed serious federal crimes on his behalf, forced investigations into or taken other forms of revenge against more than 100 of his supposed political enemies, and threatened to do worse. No other presidential administration has come anywhere near the lines that Trump openly crosses—not even President Nixon, whose top Justice Department officials resigned rather than appear to act at his behest at the peak of the Watergate scandal.

In fact, Trump threatened Elon Musk with "serious consequences" today if Musk moved against him politically, less than a day after other people in Trump's orbit had called for investigations into Musk's citizenship and the termination of his government contracts. 

There is, bluntly, no chance that these steps were taken except on Trump's direct orders. In other words, the explanation for Trump's sudden lack of involvement is that he wanted to back down from his defiance of the Supreme Court, but couldn't bear to admit that he was submitting to the rule of law.

Why does this matter?

• Obeying a lawful order of the Supreme Court isn't a sign of weakness and it's a problem if the president thinks it is.  

• A president who can't take responsibility for their actions isn't fit for office.

• This is why the executive branch isn't supposed to interfere in prosecutions for political reasons in the first place.