Trump defends travel ban, slams London mayor
› People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN! DONALD TRUMP, US president, on Twitter
WASHINGTON : Defending the “travel ban” as both a phrase and process, President Donald Trump said on Monday the justice department should seek a quicker hearing at the Supreme Court against the stay ordered by lower courts, and go for a tougher version.
In a string of tweets prompted by the London terrorist attack, he fumed against critics of the phrase “travel ban”, courts for ordering stays on it and his own justice department for watering down the order from the first, more stringent version.
He also escalated his feud with London mayor Sadiq Khan, saying in a tweet, “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his ‘no reason to be alarmed’ statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!”
Trump had misinterpreted a remark from Khan — “no reason to be alarmed” to attack the mayor, who had refused to join issue saying, through spokesperson, that he had more important things to do.
Trump is using the terrorist attack to double down on this “travel ban” to temporarily prevent citizens from six muslimmajority countries from entering the US. “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!,” he wrote on Twitter.
“The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.,” he wrote in another post, adding, “The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court - & seek much tougher version!”
And rounded off with this: “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!”
TRUMP IGNORED ADVICE ON NATO SPEECH
Trump ignored advice from his top national security officials when he refused to reaffirm US commitment to a key clause of the NATO military alliance that commits member nations to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all of them.
Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser HR McMaster had all strongly pushed for Trump’s speech in Brussels to include a line on US commitment to the clause, Article 5.
They believed they had been heard, but were shocked at its omission when the president finally spoke.
That was not the speech they had worked on and they were not even informed of the change.
They came to know of the change only when the speech was delivered. The stance could have major consequences for an alliance already unsettled by the president’s scepticism and insistence on members meeting their payment obligations.
Reported by Politico news site on Monday, the revelation, which had gone uncontested by the White House for most part of the day, sent shockwaves through the US foreign policy establishment and is bound to worry governments around the world.
Trump’s omission disappointed NATO allies, specially its members from Easter Europe worried by an aggressive Russia, according to reports.