Protesters gather at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Saturday night, January 28, 2017, to denounce President Donald Trump’s ban on the entry of refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. (Photo: Christopher Lee / The New York Times)
The Trump executive order that puts into place a series of unconstitutional restrictions on migration of citizens of seven Middle Eastern and African countries is anything but an instance of harried incompetence by an inexperienced White House staff. Rather, it is, like so many other Trump executive orders and presidential memoranda, a malignant, strategic attack on democracy. A closer look at the pre-history and logic of the ban reveals that the Muslim Ban executive order is one among many drastic measures that Trump and his strategists and advisers are deliberately enacting in order to consolidate their power in the face of Trump’s lack of electoral mandate.
On December 7, 2015, while campaigning in Republican primaries, Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Once Trump became the GOP nominee, the total ban was changed to a form of “extreme vetting,” which included testing migrants for loyalty and adherence to liberal values, such as religious tolerance and respect for women and LGBT rights.
Trump — and his policy team, chief strategist Steve Bannon (formerly manager of the extremist right-wing website Breitbart) and senior adviser Stephen Miller (formerly aide to racist Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions) — made good on this promise on Friday, January 27, 2016, by signing an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” The order has been interpreted in varying and sometimes contradictory ways. It appears that the order was at first interpreted to do four things: First, it suspended the entry of Syrian refugees, even those granted…