President Trump Calls It a Travel Ban – Lawyers Call it Self-Sabotage

Trump’s tweets either matter or they don’t. You stand with them in times of adversity but you call them out when they are wrong.

“These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters”. Trump’s lawyers also excised a preference for refugees from religious minorities (typically Christians), which critics cited as evidence of unconstitutional anti-Muslim bias. “He cares that you call it national security and that we take steps to protect the people of this country”. And that’s all thanks to Twitter. “You can not say the president intends this to be a temporary ban if what he says implies that it will apply ad infinitum”, said Mark Foster of Zuckerman Spaeder.

Those tweets undermine an earlier statement by Trump’s communications team, and emphasize the struggle with communicating for a President who is known for his off-the-cuff ability to reach out to his followers directly on Twitter. “There are many things about which Donald Trump is wrong”. That award goes to New York Rep. Chris Colllins during an interview on CNN’s “New Day”. It took him three days to even acknowledge the stabbing attack in Portland where two young men were killed and a third was seriously injured for standing up to Islamophobia and hate. Calling it politically correct and watered down strongly indicates that he doesn’t mean it. So there is a balance. “The president’s made that very clear: it is a travel ban”. Dorf particularly pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, when the court used statements from the supporters of a law requiring schools to teach creationism to find it violated the establishment clause.

The Supreme Court of the United States has given opponents of the travel ban until June 12 to respond to the government’s request to allow immediate implementation of the executive order. Second, the attack on courts makes it much harder for courts, including the Supreme Court, to rule for Trump even when the law is otherwise on his side.

The second-guessing about Trump’s Twitter strategy extended to the husband of one Trump’s senior advisers.

Any attempt to differentiate between Trump’s Twitter feed and the official voice of the White House is a distinction without a difference. In a strongly worded dissent, Judge Paul Niemeyer of the 4th Circuit said the majority’s reliance on campaign statements for its ruling “to impose a new meaning on an unambiguous executive order is completely unusual to judicial analysis”.

Justice department lawyers might also have a tougher time arguing that their revised executive order is substantially different from the first one.

That is a reality that the White House staff, who, by the way, are the only ones urging Trump to tweet less, needs to come to grips with. Painter told me that if the acting SG and his colleagues knew or should have known the temporary immigration suspension was a pretext for President Trump to ban immigration from the affected countries, they may have committed ethical violations.

Jonathan Tisch, chief executive of Loews Hotel & Co, warned that policies viewed as hostile to foreign visitors could damage the United States industry, much as a visa crackdown and other policies after 9/11 led to the loss of billions of dollars in revenues from overseas travelers.