Trump attacks his own travel ban
U.S. president criticized revised policy in barrage of early morning tweets
WASHINGTON— The president of the United States is now attacking his own policy.
In a perplexing and highly unusual series of Twitter comments before 7 a.m. on Monday, Donald Trump criticized his presidential order for a ban on visitors from six Muslim-majority countries — falsely claiming the Justice Department, not he, issued this revised directive.
“The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.,” Trump wrote, referring to the Supreme Court.
“The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court — & seek much tougher version!” he continued.
The tweets were greeted with groans even from conservative legal experts who strongly support the policy. The tweets could harm his chances of winning in court.
“His tweets show utter disregard for the Justice Department’s legal strategy,” Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, wrote in an article on the website Lawfare.
Trump’s legal team has been attempting to convince federal judges that the ban is a “good faith” effort to protect national security, not a Muslim ban by another name and not a disguised twin of the original travel ban he issued in January. But the courts have disagreed so far, and their decisions have taken into account Trump’s remarks outside the courtroom.
“It’s kinda odd to have the defendant in Hawaii v. Trump acting as our co-counsel. We don’t need the help but will take it!” Neal Katyal, the lead lawyer for Hawaii’s legal challenge to the ban, wrote on Twitter.
Trump was even criticized by George Conway, a prominent lawyer who is the husband of senior Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway.
In a television appearance on Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway had derided a media “obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter.” But George said Trump’s most recent tweets could cause real problems.
“These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help (the solicitor general) get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad,” Conway wrote on Twitter.
Trump’s administration last week asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Trump campaigned on a “total and complete” ban on foreign Muslims entering the country. He issued the revised ban after the January version was blocked in court and widely criticized.
The revised version seeks to ban people from Iran, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria for 90 days; it deletes Iraq from the original list. The revised version also seeks a 120day ban on Syrian refugees rather than the indefinite ban of the previous version, and it explicitly exempts permanent residents who hold “green cards.”
But the revised version has also been stymied in court. Trump’s most recent defeat came at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, which ruled in May that the policy “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”
Trump may have further undermined his case with another tweet in the Monday series.
While he and his legal team have argued that a temporary ban is necessary for the administration to figure out how to strengthen vetting procedures, Trump suggested he had already done so — adding an insult to the judiciary. “In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!” he wrote. He also denounced London Mayor Sadiq Khan for rejecting Trump’s misleading criticism.
Khan had urged Londoners to not be alarmed by an increased police presence following the terror attacks on Saturday. Trump had misleadingly suggested that Khan was telling the city not to be alarmed by the murder of its residents. Khan, through a spokesman, responded that Trump had taken him out of context.
The acting U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, Lewis Lukens, had tried to play peacemaker on Sunday, tweeting support for Khan’s “strong leadership.”
But Trump went after Khan once more on Monday, tweeting: “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his “no reason to be alarmed” statement. MSM [mainstream media] is working hard to sell it!”