Damn, I would have expected a full-blown national crisis to have taken at least a year or two, but here we are at the end of Week One of the Trump era, in which we appear to have passed the critical threshold whereby the Resistance has become the Uprising.
Trump issued an executive order that immediately banned citizens of seven (mostly-Muslim) countries from entering the US, for a period of 90 days. This isn’t just a matter of tourists visiting the US and so on, but rather a blanket ban on all non-US citizens from those countries (with exceptions for diplomats and certain other cases), regardless of whether they were already legal US residents with a green card.
The order went into effect immediately, meaning that even those who had grown up nearly their entire life in the United States, had legal permanent residence, and were already in the air at the time the order was issued were met immediately upon arrival with handcuffs and detainment cells. In some cases, they were met with deportation.
Travelers who had gone home for the holidays, attended a funeral, visited family, or were sent on a business trip are now discovering that they might never be able to return. Some of them have jobs, mortgages, university placement, and other obligations which they’ll likely be forced to abandon altogether.
Some of them have children.
“It’s only 90 days,” defenders say, as if landlords are lenient enough to put up with that kind of delinquency like it’s no big deal. Not only is that guaranteed to cause financial ruin to quite a few innocent people, but there’s also the rapidly-approaching possibility that it won’t be just 90 days, as Rudy Giuliani has openly said Trump asked for a Muslim ban, in general, rather than a country-specific, short-term hiccup. It was also an overt statement during the campaign. The problem is not just what is happening now. The problem is what will happen down the road, if and when the proposed Muslim registry goes into effect, and they’re rounded up and banned outright.
Reports indicate that Steve Bannon, Trump’s Rasputin-like string-puller who now holds a seat on the National Security council despite having no national security experience, personally overruled the Department of Homeland Security’s recommendation that the immigration ban shouldn’t apply to anyone already a legal resident of the United States. Though it still would have caused collateral damage to innocent people (it bans most refugees, for example), at least it wouldn’t have caused pointless collateral damage to legal US residents, who were caught up in a storm they couldn’t possibly plan to avoid, as they were literally in the air at the time.
To be fair, I don’t exactly have a problem with immigration protocols, including strict ones, or even measures targeting specific countries, all of which is fairly standard. But any discussion of whether or not this will keep anyone safe is immediately dismissible by reviewing the simple fact that forging a passport from a non-banned country will immediately circumvent the ban. Furthermore, since the ban allows Christian refugees into the US with no problem, all they’d have to do is say they’re Christian, prove it with a few recently-memorized Bible verses and church attendance photos, and thus it becomes clear how this whole ordeal is far more likely to cause unnecessary collateral damage to innocent people than it is to protect anyone, especially as it includes life-long, law-abiding, agnostic, fully legal US residents who have never visited those countries at any point in their lives. Cue the World War II Japanese internment camp comparison.
As a little side note, it will also mean that anyone currently thinking about moving to the US right now, whether Muslim or not, will quite likely have second thoughts, pick Canada instead, and thus several of the next billion-dollar tech companies will emerge up north. This has probably already caused several billion dollars worth of damage merely by shrinking the talent pool from which the US can draw from 7 billion to, like, 2.
Speculation is now swirling about whether this was merely a display of sheer stupidity, or a deliberate stunt to create a public fiasco, so that it could later be spun into a PR victory for the current anti-immigrant administration. Personally, I have a hard time believing that this is the sort of thing that can be successfully spun. Trump himself said during the campaign that if immigrants come here legally, then they’d have nothing to worry about. Anyone watching at this point knows this is nonsense. Stories of mothers who took their children to visit family back home and who are now separated from their husbands by an entire planet are being dismissed as an “inconvenience.” It’s hard to imagine the blowback from all this being desirable.
See, if you want to push for a fascist regime (which I don’t think was originally Trump’s goal, but I certainly can’t imagine he’d be upset if he were to just kinda slide into it at this point), you have to move gradually, especially if you’re being so heavily watched. You can’t just immediately cause a personal catastrophe for thousands of people and hope the fallout just works itself out somehow. You take baby steps. Issue a ban on new visas, for example. Limit the number of people who can apply for them. Ramp up surveillance measures. Start with orders that are mostly agreeable, or that are even good. Not too many people would object to enhanced vetting procedures, especially during an international refugee crisis. I probably wouldn’t, either.
It’s the next step where you move past the point of tolerable. Make people go along with each step, little by little, so that by the time you’re at Step 9, it’s just a baby step away from Step 8, and doesn’t really seem like such a big deal.
For the record: It is not my intention here to provide recommendations for implementing a fascist regime. If that’s what you want, just read 1984. It is rather to provide a critique of how Trump is simply doing it wrong. At this point in his presidency, with protests popping up all over the place, this is a gross miscalculation. He had to know that he’d suffer a massive backlash from all this, even among his own party, unless he just wasn’t bothering to pay attention. He was either too stupid to care, or wanted to pick a fight…and although massive protests are the sort of thing that can be used as an excuse to implement a police-state crackdown, it’s a lot easier to handle if they’re relatively small, don’t have a whole lot of public support, and don’t have social media documenting every moment.
So, is it better to have a smart fascist than a stupid one? Or just an impulsive, irrational buffoon, which is more likely the case? Meh, hard to say. But if Trump can’t even get this right, there’s no reason to have any faith in his ability to handle, let’s say, a nuclear standoff.
Now would be a good time to watch Dr. Strangelove, too.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Almighty God to Israel: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3) God bless Israel! Hallelujah!
I think there are quite a few American Jews thinking seriously about supporting Trump now…as there is no good alternative. But anything good is just a temporary fix as are our short lives. Eternity is way more important.
You might consider the possibility that your pessimism may be overblown.
1. Now that there is a Republican in the White House the press is back on the job questioning and challenging the administration. This may annoy some, but it is why our freedom of the press is important.
2. Our new president has a totally different approach to improving the lives of Americans; he wants to make the economic pie bigger, not divide a smaller pie into more pieces. The economy has grown in response with first quarter GDP being stronger than expected.
3. US domestic and foreign policy is now “the best defense is a strong offense”, an approach more likely to engender respect and/or fear. The immigration policy you abhor is part of this.
Government is a blunt instrument. Very big and blunt in some parts of the world.
Everyone has their own idea of what the US government should do, for me; it should create a safe place to live, a place where the law applies to the powerful as well as the rest of us, and a growing economy that creates jobs for my grandchildren and rewards prudent investment so I can keep traveling.
You are brave to keep posting political positions to your diverse reader base.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I find it kind of endearing that I can’t tell if you agree or disagree with my overall points…but that just seems to make it more of a respectful dialogue. It’s a difficult time to ride that line, but it would certainly be helpful if we could.
Trump sounds like a clickbait article.
“OBAMA RELEASES HIS COLLEGE RECORDS AND APPLICATIONS, AND BOY HE IS NOT WHO YOU THINK”
Good grief, I can’t get away from Trump Derangement Syndrome even on a travel site.
President Trump has not just the right, but the duty to protect our country from jihadists.
See, I would have no problem with that. It’s that he also screwed over green card holders who had been here for 20 years with no warning whatsoever while they were already in the air. It’s insane to ruin someone’s life all of a sudden who’s been lawfully and peacefully living in the US for decades. The new ones who want to sneak in and do us harm? Sure. But the ones who have been here and done nothing, ever? That makes no sense.
What a mistake the initial travel ban was in not taking all factors into account and not briefing relevant agencies that it was going into effect. I wasn’t aware anyone’s life was ruined by the ban, inconvenienced for sure, but ruined?
We now have a president committed to preventing more terrorists in the US. By this time in the Obama administration there had been the June 1, 2009 Little Rock, AR recruiting station shooting, killing one soldier and wounding another. The shooter told the Arkansas judge that he was a member of al-Quaeda.
Over the next seven years Americans would see twelve more attacks in which by my count 96 people died and 446 were injured. This included the 50 who died in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting and the 280 people injured in the Boston Marathon bombing. In addition we saw the horror of a women beheaded in Moore, OK at her work and nine people injured when they were knifed in a St. Cloud, MN mall with the attacker yelling “Allahu akbar!” and “Islam! Islam!” during the rampage according to witnesses.
So yes the travel ban was a blunt instrument, and it has been modified, but we have a serious problem. Let’s calm down; our new president trying to prevent terrorists attacks in the US. Can you give him a chance?
I would like to see a more effective anti-terrorist policy, for sure. I share your concerns. I just have very little confidence that Trump will do anything other than wield a sledgehammer to the problem.
Imagine, for example, if immigration to the US drops significantly, which happened during the travel ban, not just from the countries targeted. We are currently able to draw from a talent pool of 7 billion people. What sort of economic damage will it do if we can’t attract the best talent in the world? Imagine if one of the major tech companies relocated, or, more realistically, if the next big one simply never moved here. Billions of dollars in tax revenue and employee wages spent in the economy would go elsewhere. I don’t mean this as a justification to let people in without a vetting process, but that’s why I think nuance is necessary, not just preferable.
I just watched that movie. Every American should watch Doctor Strangelove.
Anyway I’m thinking about going south… f the North. Mexico is doing pretty good as long as NAFTA exists still. And a large majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress don’t want to see that tossed out. Donald Trump, once a registered Democrat, will lose support of the Republican Party mainstream. The Alternative Right are a bunch of hipsters who don’t like people who aren’t white and straight. Alex Jones is the King of them.
With one year under his belt, President Trump has overseen better than 3% growth in the US economy for the past three quarters! The unemployment rate is at a 17 year low. So far so good.
Apple announced that they are bringing $250 billion in profits back from overseas to invest in the US. That means they will pay $38 billion in taxes; that’s money the government never got at the old, higher tax rates. It could be that tax revenue will be up a lot this year.
We still have lots of problems, and lots of debate of how to address them, but prosperity makes decision making a little easier.
The US is running a real world policy experiment. We had eight years of the purest progressivism ever, now we are trying the opposite.
I would agree that I like seeing a lot of change, and some of those changes are good. It’s also useful to have someone who’s willing to get things done, even in the face of opposition. I’d just like someone more considered, and who would respect the democratic process, more so than someone who seems to act without checks and balances.
Good point about being more thougthful. We don’t get a choice of a perfect candidate, just whichever seems prepared to execute the laws of the land fairly for rich and poor, won’t punish successful, or sik the IRS on political enemies.
Looking back at the Muslim ban now, it still blows my mind. All American citizens, immigrants or even visitors help this economy grow. The Canadian government is willing to accept everyone and that will make their economy grow. A year later, and Dr. Strangelove is even more poignant.
They did their best to keep visitors out. Last year we wanted to drive a Land Rover for a client from Los Angeles California to Los Angeles de Tilarán. This would have implied 500 $ of fuel, 600 of airline tickets about 700 of paperwork for ALL the borders including the car 600 of food and beds and 1000 for the 2 of us (qualified mechanics) to do a 4800 km tricky road trip.
We were competitive to the boat solution.
But Trump wanted 400 $ of our earnings as a 2 day entrance fee to the US plus 2 trips to the embassy.
Hint. US citizens pay ZERO to enter Costa Rica or my old country France.