The Real Problem with Trump’s Executive Order

President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” isn’t a Muslim ban. The now-infamous executive order he signed last week bans non-citizens from entering the United States regardless of religion if they come from one of seven Muslim-majority nations. Those affected include Christians, Jews, atheists, pre-Islamic Yazidis, Kurds and the brave souls who risked their lives and no doubt saved American lives while working with and for the United States military.

The travel ban initially even included permanent residents of the United States who weren’t allowed to come home and wouldn’t be allowed to return home if they left.

One of the first people detained at a port of entry was a Yazidi woman whose husband worked for the United States military and already lives here. Yazidis are the victims of ISIS genocide. Blocking her entry and separating her from her husband was the immigration equivalent of the TSA strip-searching nuns at the airport.

Vian Dakhil, an Iraqi Yazidi politician who gave a famous speech in parliament about ISIS’ genocide of her people, will not be able to visit Washington next week to pick up her Lantos human rights prize. Decent people everywhere find this outrageous and stupid and cruel.

A friend of mine moved to the United States last month from Iraqi Kurdistan. He got in just under the wire. His wife needs to return to Erbil for a month to finish her master’s degree, and he sent me an email telling me she can’t go if she wants to come back to her husband, her children and her new home in America. “Things are going well here,” he said when I asked how he’s doing, “but Mr. President is giving me a hard time.”

I hired this man on one of my trips to Iraq. He was my fixer, my translator and my driver. He took me into the war zone in Kirkuk outside the Kurdish autonomous area. I trusted him with my life. He is no terrorist. That’s for damn sure. The United States government also knows he isn’t a terrorist. They vetted him for two years.

I visited Iraq seven times and wrote a book about it. I know better than the president does how mind-bogglingly dysfunctional and dangerous that country is. Taking a closer look at immigrants and refugees from Iraq will never elicit a complaint from me.

But not a single terrorist from Trump’s seven countries—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen—has ever killed anyone on American soil. Every terrorist who has ever killed anyone inside the United States came from someplace else, and none of those countries are on the travel ban list.

The 9/11 hijackers were from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Boston Marathon bombers came from Russia, one of the few foreign countries our new president is so far unwilling to criticize.

“Shoe bomber” Richard Reid was born in Britain.

The male shooter in San Bernardino was born in the United States. His wife is from Pakistan.

Omar Mateen, the Florida nightclub shooter, was also born in the United States.

If we’d had Donald Trump’s policy on the books without interuption for the past 100 years, not a single American life would have been saved.

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The radical left is doing what it does best—hyperventilating about a rising Nazi regime in America. As if the United States and its allies killed millions of Germans in the 1940s because a clown like Donald Trump saddled up in Berlin.

Even so, it’s clear now that the White House was far more interested in imposing the most draconian ban possible than in protecting American citizens.

One should never assume malevolence as a motive when incompetence explains a botched outcome just as convincingly, but we know now that much of what happened with the rollout was deliberate. The Department of Homeland Security assumed that the travel ban would not apply to Green Card holders, but the White House overruled DHS and said that the travel ban does indeed apply to permanent residents of the United States.

Aides to the chairmen of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the House Homeland Security Committee say the Trump administration refused to consult with them or even give them a heads-up about the executive order. It doesn’t take a political rocket scientist to figure out why. They would have watered it down.

During his campaign against Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump said he wants to ban every Muslim on earth from coming here. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Those are his words. He posted them on his website. That declaration is still on his website as of the time of this writing. It has been there for a year now and will almost certainly be there tomorrow.

“When [Trump] first announced it,” former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said in an interview a couple of days ago on Fox News, “he said, ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.’”

That is why thousands of protesters are streaming into airports all over the country, and that is why so many of them are calling Trump’s executive order a Muslim ban even though it is not. What the president wants is as obvious as a skyscraper to everyone who isn’t plugging their ears.

Trump didn’t want to hear from any experienced professional who might convince him to water down his executive order. Rudy Giuliani’s team had already gone far enough.

With the apparent exception of General James Mattis, Trump’s terrific pick for Secretary of Defense, Trump wants to hear from as few experienced people as possible who might moderate his positions. How else to explain his appointment of Steve Bannon—publisher of the incendiary Breitbart website that recently included a “Black Crime” section—to the National Security Council while giving the boot to the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? “Who needs to hear from intelligence or military professionals,” Max Boot sarcastically writes in Foreign Policy, “when you can hear from the publisher of Breitbart?”

So things went as planned, but not really. Trump’s disapproval rating shot up 6 points in four days. It’s already above 50 percent. By contrast, Barack Obama’s disapproval rating early in his term was just 12 percent.

Everyone from the far-left to the Trump’s Republican critics are angry. “In the future,” said Michael McCaul, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, “such policy changes should be better coordinated with the agencies implementing them and with Congress to ensure we get it right—and don’t undermine our nation’s credibility while trying to restore it.”

“It would have been smarter to coordinate with us,” Virginia Representative Dave Brat said in an interview with The Atlantic. “They could have done a better job announcing how the complexities were going to work in advance.” Brat, by the way, isn’t a Democrat or a Never Trump conservative. He is a right-wing populist and one of the president’s political allies. At least for now, anyway.

The White House is responded to all this in the time-honored tradition of politics. With lies.

“Ha! That’s my formal response,” said an anonymous Republican Congressman to The Atlantic about White House Spokesman Sean Spicer’s claim that House and Senate Republicans wrote Donald Trump’s immigrant and refugee policy. “There was precisely zero coordination with us on the drafting of this executive order.”

Spicer also argued with a straight face that the travel ban had to be rushed through at once because terrorists would swarm into the country if they had a couple weeks notice. It takes more than a year and often up to two years to be vetted as an immigrant or a refugee. Everyone left stranded and everyone who remains banned have already been vetted. They aren’t illegal immigrants. Unlike Mexican border-hoppers, these people got in line and followed the rules.

“My policy,” Trump says, “is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months.”

That statement can’t be aimed at his base. If Donald Trump’s refugee policy is no different from Barack Obama’s, what was the point of electing him in the first place? The Obama administration slowed down the refugee process for six months in 2011 for entirely sensible reasons, but it never imposed a full travel ban, especially not for permanent residents who already live here.

That’s why nobody protested at the time. To be sure, plenty on the left are partisan hacks—like every other president in American history, both Obama and Trump have their claques of clapping seals who think they’re right about everything—but no one with a lick of sense ever thought Barack Obama wanted to ban Muslims from the entering the United States.

The president said on Twitter that only 109 people were detained and held for questioning and blamed the chaos on a Delta airlines computer crash.

Sean Spicer said the same thing and more. “Remember we’re talking about a universe of 109 people,” he said. “There were 325,000 people that came into this country over a 24-hour period from another country; 109 of them were stopped for additional screening…I think it’s a shame that people were inconvenienced, obviously. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about a couple hours. I’m sorry that some folks may have had to wait a little while.”

Give us a break. That doesn’t take into account the 348 people in airports all over the world who weren’t allowed to get on planes in the first place, nor does it take into account those, like the Yazidi human rights activist who isn’t welcome here anymore, who were authorized to come here and can’t now. It certainly doesn’t take into account the massive diplomatic and political fallout worldwide or the fact that it feeds into the insane ISIS narrative that the West and the Muslim world are engaged in a clash of civilizations.

American diplomats in Baghdad are warning us—to no avail whatsoever—that our delicate military and political ties are in jeopardy right in the middle of the war against ISIS. You don’t have to take their word for it. Listen to Iraqi General Talib al Kenani in his interview with CBS News. “I’m a four-star general, and I’m banned from entering the U.S.? I have been fighting terrorism for 13 years and winning. Now my kids are now asking if I’m a terrorist? There are many American troops here in Iraq. After this ban how are we supposed to deal with each other? We thought we were partners with our American friends, and now we realize that we’re just considered terrorists.”

The very people we need to keep on our side in the Middle East feel like we hate them, and they aren’t imagining things. The president’s most strident supporters clearly do hate them. The mood in America has grown so alarmingly vicious and reactionary lately that I had to close my comment section for the first time in fifteen years. I will not even consider turning it back on until Donald Trump is out of the White House. The volume of nastiness and hostility is so overwhelming that the entire world is hearing it now that it has a champion in the White House. It’s going to blow back in our faces in ways that we haven’t even figured out yet.  

“It’s a very dangerous thing,” writes Hoover Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes, “to have a White House that can’t with the remotest pretense of competence and governance put together a major policy document on a crucial set of national security issues without inducing an avalanche of litigation and wide diplomatic fallout.”

Former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus is urging the administration to wind down the travel ban as quickly as possible. “Americans should not take the current international order for granted,” he said. “It did not will itself into existence. We created it. Likewise, it is not naturally self-sustaining. We have sustained it. If we stop doing so, it will fray and, eventually, collapse.”

The Trump administration deliberately crafted an executive order to inflict the maximum amount of pain possible, waited for everyone from the radical left to the moderate right to explode, then walked the worst parts of it back and lied about it on television. This isn’t governing. It’s tin-pot theatrics hatched by the former publisher of Breitbart who told journalist and historian Ron Radosh that he wants “to destroy the state” and “bring everything crashing down.” It’s precisely the kind of thing more than 100 conservative foreign policy professionals had in mind last year when they signed a letter saying they refused to work for a Trump administration.

So what’s the real problem with the president’s executive order? The real problem is that President Donald J. Trump has proven himself to be a man who will substitute foreign policy, national security, domestic tranquility and America’s reputation with manipulative axe-grinding political drama. “But Hillary” will cut it no more. She is irrelevant now.

Those of us who hoped against the longest of odds that he would grow up and pivot can’t anymore. We know him now as a president and not just a candidate. The gravity of the job is not inspiring him to rise to the majesty of his office. He’s not just boasting about grabbing women by the pussy and yukking it up at sports arenas before howling mobs demanding he throw his political opponent in prison. He’s actually governing now, and he is doing so as a chaos engine.

The Trump era in American history will be every bit as aggressively ugly and stupid as the majority of American voters feared it would be.