Trump refugee mess previews failures ahead: Marc Ambinder
He doesn't like experts but his presidency is doomed unless he starts listening to them.
President Trump’s executive order suspending most travel from Syria and seven other predominantly Muslim countries has now encountered mass protests, slap-downs from federal judges and resistance from an acting attorney general that he had to fire, turning her into a martyr for civil rights.
The new president's showy signing ceremony and his tweets defending the travel ban may temporarily convince many supporters that he followed through on his promises. But this policy will almost certainly not last the year — if it lasts at all. And if he's smart, this way of running the government won't last long either.
The refugees ban is a textbook example of how not to make policy. Its genesis exacerbated tension between him and congressional Republicans. It emboldened a visible and attention-getting opposition. It alienated his own Cabinet secretaries. Now he’s staring down the first defeat of his short presidency, and it isn’t because American values triumphed or because protesters forced him to back down.
It’s because he rushed through an executive order without consulting the people he needs to make it work. His team didn’t tell the State Department which countries would subject to the visa restrictions, The Wall Street Journal reports. The New York Times found Department of Homeland Security aides eager to dish dirt on how the new secretary, John Kelly, learned about the executive order from watching Trump sign it on television. We don’t know if lawyers at the DHS, or the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, got a chance to vet the language. (Trump’s team is vague about this.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel got little if any chance to judge its consistency with other laws and directives.
Its slapdash language reads more like a policy screed than an official order. It bungled the treatment of permanent residents, or green card holders. And its history as a public policy is replete with comments attesting to its discriminatory motives. (Rudy Giuliani bragged about how then-candidate Trump asked him how to “show me the right way to do it legally” after calling it a “Muslim ban.” You can bet these words will be near the top of every filing the ACLU sends to federal courts.)
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Why Trump’s team did this is not mysterious. He doesn’t trust the government. He styles himself as a disrupter. He seems to thrive on chaos, and he expects subordinates to follow orders. Alas, the government is not a business — and it is not, certainly, one structured to feed his ego like the Trump organization or his presidential campaign.
He can’t control the chaos. He needs his Cabinet secretaries to do that, through political control of the bureaucracy. Kelly and Defense secretary Gen. James Mattis were supposed to be the stewards of norms. A lot of us hoped that they would temper Trump’s baser, cruder, punitive instincts. Another grown-up, Rex Tillerson, who’s slated to be confirmed as Trump’s secretary of State, was reportedly baffled that he had not been consulted at all.
So far, they’ve seemed powerless, except for one Cabinet member who hasn't been confirmed yet and apparently won't be a check: Sen. Jeff Sessions, the attorney general designee, pushed the White House to quickly unleash these orders.
The green card mess offered an unnerving glimpse into the new administration. When Trump made the order public, DHS lawyers immediately determined that green card holders would be exempt; but Trump’s team overruled them publicly, saying that (somehow) individual Customs and Border Patrol officers had the discretion to evaluate each one. That was Saturday. On Sunday, Trump’s increasingly beleaguered chief of staff Reince Priebus said well, no, lawful permanent residents would be allowed to travel “going forward.” Sort of. That same day, in a declaration that should have been part of the original order, Kelly said he saw no inherent national security threat from green card holders. By Monday, green card holders had Kelly’s full blessing to travel.
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This is embarrassing. It’s counterproductive. It’s weak. And it could have been avoided. Trump’s authority as president to determine who gets to enter the country is pretty broad.
But the more he ignores the interagency process and the bureaucracy, the more he opens up his policy agenda to legal challenge and, specifically, to defeat and failure. He ran on a platform to blow up the status quo. But he needs the status quo to work for him in order for his victories not to be temporary and transitory.
Trump has never had much of a need for experts. If he wants a remote chance of permanently changing Washington, he must listen to them. If I had to guess, I’d wager that he won’t. That’s not who he is. His policy is pique.
Marc Ambinder, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and a fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, is working on a book about nuclear brinksmanship in the Cold War. Follow him on Twitter: @marcambinder.
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