Returning to the eternal question of whether Donald Trump believes his own BS, check out his answer during Thursday’s bizarre press conference, on whether there were any mistakes in the roll-out of his Muslim ban.
Let me tell you about the travel ban. We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban.
And that’s why the ban remains in effect today, has caused no problems at any point, and has a whopping 38 percent support.
But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision. We had a court that's been overturned. Again, may be wrong. But I think it's 80 percent of the time, a lot.
You didn’t have “a” court. While the 9th Circuit was the appeals court to get to the ban first, a series of federal district judges around the country had already put holds on different parts of the executive order. Trump’s “very smooth rollout” was racking up quite the record of court losses. And his administration had backed down on applying it to green card holders.
We had a bad decision. We're going to keep going with that decision. We're going to put in a new executive order next week some time. But we had a bad decision.
It was a bad decision and “we’re going to keep going with that,” except that almost immediately after the press conference, they told the 9th Circuit that “the president intends in the near future to rescind the Order and replace it.”
That's the other thing that was wrong with the travel ban. You had Delta with a massive problem with their computer system at the airports. You had some people that were put out there, brought by very nice busses, and they were put out at various locations.
Delta’s computer outage didn't happen until Sunday, after a couple of judges had already ruled against the ban and massive protests had broken out all over the place. And about those people who “were put out there, brought by very nice buses.” That's not how it happened. In New York, authorities restricted access to the AirTrain because it was overcrowded with all the people showing up to protest. New Yorkers hate the AirTrain. Getting to JFK is miserable. But thousands of people did it anyway. And buses, really? How organized and well-funded does Donald Trump think the resistance is, that it could apparently turn out thousands of charter buses in cities around the country when he signed his ban with no notice? No, people just showed up to protest his cruelty, because it was the right thing to do.
Despite that the only problem that we had is we had a bad court. We had a court that gave us what I consider to be, with great respect, a very bad decision. Very bad for the safety and security of our country. The rollout was perfect.
Again, it was not a court loss, it was many of them, culminating with an appellate court loss which Trump (or his handlers) has apparently decided not to appeal just hours after he insisted that “We're going to keep going with that decision.”