It’s safe to say that nobody expects anything particularly intellectual to come out of Donald Trump‘s mouth. A word salad of angry invective from a brain that appears to live in a parallel universe, sure, but a fully-formed and knowledgeable opinion? That’s uh, not his thing.
Despite these rock bottom expectations, observers were left stunned at last night’s White House press conference when Trump appeared to believe that “Habeas Corpus” is someone’s name, leaving him wondering who this mysterious Mr Corpus was:
Q: Have you given any more thought to possibly suspending habeas corpus?
TRUMP: Suspending who?
Q: Habeas corpus
TRUMP: I don’t know. I’d rather leave that to Kristi. pic.twitter.com/DdjFnoUIrM
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 8, 2025
Trump blinked blankly and leaned forward as a tame journalist tossed him a softball question about suspending habeas corpus due to “insurrectionists across the nation” and “deporting illegal aliens”.
This is essentially giving Trump a license to wax lyrical on his favorite topic, but it seems the ol’ presidential grey matter was particularly squidgy last night, as Trump furrowed his brow and asked, “uh, suspending who?” Realizing he was out of his depth, Trump passed the question to Kristi Noem, which isn’t much of an intellectual upgrade.
Latin? Sounds un-American
We get that for Trump, “Latin” is suspiciously close to “Latino” but you’d expect even the dumbest president to know that habeas corpus is the legal principle that protects against unlawful detention by requiring authorities to bring a detained person before a court to determine if their imprisonment is lawful. For all we know, Trump woke up this morning with “find and deport Mr Corpus” scrawled on his to-do list.
Trump slipping up so embarrassingly and so publicly is funny. However, it’s a rough chuckle as you realize this idiot is rapidly gaining supreme power beyond any previous president in American history. It would also be funnier if Trump were capable of being embarrassed by his own stupidity, but that ship hasn’t so much sailed as been sunk to the bottom of a harbor sometime in the 1980s.
Also, why should Trump even concern himself about habeas corpus? After all, the concept has already become hazy and faint over the last ten months: give it a year, and the notion will have gone the way of the dodo. Far better to simply toss your opponents and victims into a nightmare prison, throw away the key, and just forget they ever existed. Trials, judges, legal representation provided by the state? Sounds like communism.