Our Man in Moscow

… this has all been going on for a while

This week, we continue looking at our predicament in Washington and on the world stage through the oddly predictive Batman comic books of the 1960s. You can go back to the beginning by visiting our February 26 post, The Dark Night.

But even as we use these new AI tools to redraw the present, with each passing day, we learn more about the weird origins of current reality. Just today, for instance, I learned that the way Donald Trump may have discovered the notorious prison in El Salvador — the one to which he deported hundreds of unverified, unnotified, and uninterrogated migrants, a prison no one ever leaves alive — was probably from the Miss Universe contest in 2023.

As the former owner of the Miss Universe pageant, POTUS 47 would not have failed to notice its closing ceremony being overseen by Presidente Nayib Bukele or to learn that Bukele was defying constitutional term limits to run for reelection. By the time of the pageant, Bukele had more than 72,000 people locked up without due process on vague allegations or their tattoos.

Sound familiar? Bukele also went after journalists, labor organizers, human rights groups and other critics, mobilized an elaborate, one-sided communications machine to spread his message, and made BitCoin a national currency. At a gala…