It has taken almost exactly one week to make the specter of Americans marching on the White House to demand the removal of the President of the United States an entirely thinkable event.
The day after Trump’s sparsely attended inaugural ceremony, the largest crowd ever to protest anything in this nation’s history gathered in cities and towns to rally in support for women’s rights, and voice their opposition to Donald Trump and all that he stands for. Incredibly enough, that may have been the high water mark of Trump’s presidency.
Since then Trump has conducted himself so erratically, from his the-media-is-the-real-enemy speech to the CIA, to his midweek Mexico fit, to finishing the week with executive orders so poorly thought out that they generated a fresh round of spontaneous protests that were incredible powerful — and effective. And at all times his absolute fixation on the press, and how he is being covered. His incessant, mosquito-ish whining, whining, whining seems both more sick and more pitiful by the day.
By the end of the week, Jason Chaffetz — that Jason Chaffetz — was wondering if aspirants to the presidency really shouldn’t have an independent medical examination for mental health, and GQ was complaining that it was getting difficult to think up new ways to indicate that Donald Trump was “a dangerous, delusional lunatic.”
Never have so many people spent so much time intently studying the 25th Amendment.
Just remember as we head into week 2 that the question isn’t whether Trump is ever more obviously insane or ever more openly a jackbooted fascist. He can be both.
The only real question is this one: Do Democrats in the House and Senate understand that they should never cooperate with Trump on any issue, or any nominee, on any day. Because the rest of us? We get it.
Come on. Let’s read pundits.
The New York Times was the target of Trump’s Saturday Twitter tantrum. Probably because he saw this.
First, reflect on the cruelty of President Trump’s decision on Friday to indefinitely suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees and temporarily ban people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. It took just hours to begin witnessing the injury and suffering this ban inflicts on families that had every reason to believe they had outrun carnage and despotism in their homelands to arrive in a singularly hopeful nation.
The first casualties of this bigoted, cowardly, self-defeating policy were detained early Saturday at American airports just hours after the executive order, ludicrously titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” went into effect.
Cruel. Bigoted. Cowardly. Self-defeating. And that doesn’t even begin to reach the level of loathing that Americans should have toward this fundamentally immoral and unjust order. The order needs to not just be rescinded, it must be repudiated.
David Bier notes that the ban isn’t just cruel, bigoted, etc. It’s also illegal.
President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that purports to bar for at least 90 days almost all permanent immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria and Iraq, and asserts the power to extend the ban indefinitely.
But the order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin.
Congress finally acted after decades of discriminatory immigration laws that limited, or outright banned, immigrants from China, Japan, and other nations in Asia.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin, replacing the old prejudicial system and giving each country an equal shot at the quotas. In signing the new law, President Lyndon B. Johnson said that “the harsh injustice” of the national-origins quota system had been “abolished.”
Trump’s argument that his order targets a “class” of immigrants is laughable. It’s as if he declared that immigrants could be from any sex, so long as they weren’t capable of having children, then argued that it wasn’t a ban on women.
Over 13,000 executive orders have been written, and only a handful have every been knocked down in court. However, it seems entirely likely that it will soon be a handful + 1.
Moustafa Bayoumi also brings up the ban on Asian immigration.
The order is nothing short of a Muslim ban by another name. It is cruel and callous, espouses positions contrary to the professed values of the United States, and will certainly produce more problems than it purports to solve. In other words, it’s exactly like Donald Trump.
I cannot tell you how livid these scant pages of bureaucratic language make me. In them, Trump is returning the country to the dark days of excluding masses of people on the basis of our national prejudices. It’s as if we’ve reverted to the late 19th century when laws were passed to bar Chinese entry to the US, but this time the action is by executive fiat and trained on Muslims. Not incidentally, the case law for Chinese Exclusion also established the legal authority for the National Security Entry-Exist Registration System (Nseers), the US government’s previous incarnation of a Muslim registry. We’re never far away from our demons.
Things do linger. No president things of himself as evil, but every president should considering spending their last six months reviewing all the things they created in the bulk of their presidency and thinking “could someone other than me use this to evil purposes?” Where the answer is “yes.” knock it down. Where the answer is “maybe” burn it. And if the answer is “no,” use more imagination.
David Miliband delivers a rebuke that goes beyond Trump to anyone who ever cheered him on.
President Trump’s executive order suspending the entire resettlement program for 120 days and banning indefinitely the arrival of Syrian refugees is a repudiation of fundamental American values, an abandonment of the United States’ role as a humanitarian leader and, far from protecting the country from extremism, a propaganda gift to those who would plot harm to America.
There is no victory that ISIS could score on the battlefield that would give them more of a boost than the one Donald Trump delivered on Friday, when he instituted his illegal (and unconstitutional) ban or on Saturday when Trump signed an order demanding a hasty plan to address ISIS that includes checking whether committing war crimes would speed things along.
There are also thousands of Afghans and Iraqis whose lives are at risk because of assistance they offered American troops stationed in their countries. Of all the refugees that my organization, the International Rescue Committee, would be helping to resettle this year, this group, the Special Immigrant Visa population, makes up a fourth.
Cecilia Wang and Trump’s disturbingly awful timing.
On Friday, which was Holocaust Remembrance Day, the White House put out a statement that failed to mention the 6 million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. Hours later, Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending all refugee resettlement for 120 days and indefinitely suspending the resettlement of refugees from Syria.
At first this seemed like just a mistake. It’s easy to think Trump could scratch out a statement on the Holocaust and not even remember the century in which it occurred. It’s also easy enough to believe that Trump didn’t think of the symbolism of issuing his order on that day.
Only the White House has not admitted — actually, stated smugly — that omitting any mention of Jews being involved in the holocaust was intention. After all “other people died.” Which would also seem to suggest that the timing of Trump’s action may also have been intentional.
Trump announced during his press conference that his order will help Christians to enter the US. In effect, Trump has barred Muslims from entering the US, while favoring the entry of Christians. One of the tenets upon which our country was founded is that religion is our own business and not the government’s.
That’s the part that’s not just illegal, but unconstitutional. Or at least, it’s one of the parts that unconstitutional.
And what do you know, it’s taken one (1) week for Ross Douthat to decide that the problem is the Washington press corp and not Trump or Trump’s policies, which simply shock those staid old DC “mandarins.” And … poof. Just like that. No Douthat.
Ruth Marcus has some words that GQ may not have tried so far.
There have been scarier weeks for the country, certainly — the Cuban missile crisis and the Sept. 11 attacks. There have been more tragic ones — the Sept. 11 attacks again, the terrible toll of wartime, the horror of four presidential assassinations. ...
But the first week of the Trump presidency was alarming in a different way, because the frightening part involved the president’s own erratic, even bizarre, behavior.
Anyone who paid even glancing attention to the 2016 campaign already understood Donald Trump to be undisciplined, easily provoked and self-absorbed to the point of narcissism. But it was one thing to know that in theory; it was much more unsettling to witness President Trump in action. In depressing retrospect, the dark inaugural address, with its invocation of “carnage” and “tombstones,” was the week’s high point.
So Ruth and I differ by 24 hours on the timing for Peak Trump. We don’t disagree that Trump continues to slide into the Slough of Despond. And hey, go read all of this one. It’s your assignment for the week.
Daniel Camacho issues a challenge to Democrats.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s shift from grilling Ben Carson to voting to approve him for the top job at the Housing and Urban Development agency has puzzled many. Her explanation that she has continued concerns about Carson’s inexperience for the position but was swayed by his promises is feeble at best. Ardent Democratic party loyalists and centrist commentators are rationalizing away these votes but fail to see the larger picture.
Feeble is way, way to kind. Warren’s vote is indefensible. She knows that Carson is unqualified in every sense of the world. He doesn’t have the knowledge, or the interest, or the temperament, or even the desire to learn.
If the Democratic party is to have any future, it will not come from following rich white men like David Brock. It must center on those who are at the bottom of our society. Resistance in the name of a better world has to happen and Democrats have to decide if they want to be part of it or not. If not, they must move out of the way.
The Democratic Party has a future. But even Democrats as popular as Warren may find that, if they don’t wake up to the danger of doing anything to assist Trump, their party will move on without them.
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong on a figure who was marching with the women last week — in spirit.
Mary Richards wasn’t trying to be anyone’s feminist icon. She became an associate producer at a Minneapolis TV station not because she was trying to make a statement but because she needed a job to support her new life on her own in the city after a breakup. She took birth control pills because she was a responsible single woman who dated. She stayed out all night on a date because she was having a good time. She gave her best friend, Rhoda, a pep talk about body image because Rhoda needed it. She asked for a paycheck equal to her male predecessor’s because it seemed only fair. ...
Would a modern Mary — no TV star, no feminist icon, just a woman living life on her terms — have marched? Of course. In fact, that’s exactly who made the march powerful: Millions of Marys — this time of all ages and colors and backgrounds — realized that they didn’t have to be famous, they didn’t need a degree in women’s studies, and they didn’t have to be paragons of feminism. They deserved to demand basic equality, and together they could command at least as much attention as a TV show.
If you have a hat, throw it. Into the ring, if possible.
The Washington Post on events 180-degrees from the women’s march.
On Friday, the Russian lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved a bill that decriminalizes domestic battery for first-time offenders. Battery against a family member will be subject to administrative rather than criminal penalty if it does not cause serious medical harm. …
The move fits a larger drive by Mr. Putin and some of his allies to instill what they call traditional family values.
It doesn’t matter which side of the red telephone you’re on. If someone is preaching “traditional family values,” what they mean is men having more control over women. Don’t be surprised if some version of the “permission to slap your wife around” bill doesn’t appear in a state house near you.