Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
For new order, a more considered approach
WASHINGTON — A staple of President Trump’s early flurry of executive actions was the big reveal – the president seated behind a desk proudly displaying his new edict for the cameras.
On Monday, though, when Trump signed a second order temporarily halting travel from nations deemed to pose a high risk to U.S. security, there was no show of the president affixing his signature to an official document. Instead, three Cabinet secretaries spoke publicly blocks from the White House.
Gone was the immediate implementation that triggered chaos the first time, replaced with a 10-day preparation period.
Both the public unveiling of the new directive and private machinations leading up to it revealed both how the Trump administration was course-correcting after stumbles in its tumultuous early weeks. And sidetracked again this weekend by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that President Barack Obama illegally ordered surveillance of his communications during the campaign, the administration found value in demonstrating it could function relatively routinely.
“That’s what we wanted to highlight today, is the government getting it done,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Monday.
Notably, that meant that reporters had no scheduled opportunity to see the president at work for the first time in the 32 weekdays of the Trump administration.
It was on his sixth working day, Jan. 27, that Trump traveled to the Pentagon to sign the initial executive order banning travel to the U.S. from seven mostly Muslim nations, while also indefinitely banning the admission of Syrian refugees and halting other refugee admissions for 120 days.
At first, the only glimpse the public had of the order were on one-and-a-half pages that the president proudly displayed from behind a wooden desk.
The White House neither published the executive order nor answered questions about it for hours, and the confusion blossomed in the following days amid long waits at airport immigration lines, detentions and protests.
Monday’s rollout was more deliberate, with White House aides and agency officials briefing reporters, followed by an on-camera announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly.
The only confirmation of Trump’s role was a photo tweeted by Spicer showing him signing it.
The White House offered two main explanations for the dramatically different approaches. First, when the initial order was released, neither Sessions nor Tillerson was in office yet as they awaited confirmation. And second, court decisions suspending the first order gave the administration a road map to avoiding legal challenges.
Spicer said Monday that the revised order was crafted after a more extensive review process involving the White House Domestic Policy Council but led by Homeland Security.
Justice Department lawyers, including those from the Office of Legal Counsel, played an “active” role in writing, revising and approving the final draft of the order, according to two officials at the agency. The State Department worked with the Iraqi government to gain assurances that led to its removal from the banned nations list.
And White House officials also sought more significant input from lawmakers than they had before the first order, a key factor that left the administration nearly isolated in defending it at the time.