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President Donald Trump is joined by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during a visit to the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday in Washington.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Tuesday night, via Twitter, Donald Trump announced, Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall! Those many other things include placing limits on the number of refugees admitted to the United States to 50,000 a year (down from 100,000) and imposing a temporary ban on most refugees. Trump also intends to go after sanctuary cities in the U.S., to step up deportations dramatically, and to revisit current interrogation policiesincluding a possible move to reinstate black-site detention facilities operated by the CIA.

Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate, and hosts the podcast Amicus.

At the center of this spate of executive orders is Trumps campaign promise to go after Muslims simply for being Muslim. Starting with his promise to bomb the shit out of ISIS and his pledge to torture family members of suspected terrorists, Trump has made targeting Muslims at home and abroad a cornerstone of his political identity. He will now make it an animating principle of his presidency.

During the campaign, Trump proposed an all-out ban on Muslim immigration (a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.) He also called for a domestic Muslim registry. Toward the end of the campaign, that pledge was tweakeda seeming concession to the fact that a religion-based ban would clearly violate the Constitution. The pledge was changed to simply restrict all immigration from terror-prone countries, which is precisely what is now being proposed. Trump also began to speak of imposing extreme vetting on immigrants from Muslim countries, in spite of the fact that such refugees are already subject to extremely draconian procedures. At first blush, these kinds of programs are not necessarily unconstitutional, although they will be subject to immediate court challenges, and there is some reason to believe that courts will find religion-based immigration directives to be impermissible.

According to the draft executive order obtained on Wednesday by the Huffington Post, the following would happen immediately:

The country of origin ban is closely modeled on the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which was put in place after 9/11 and then shut down. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and an immigration hawk, was photographed with Trump just after the election not-accidentally holding a strategic plan folder that appeared to revive the NSEERS program, which forced adult-age males from 25 majority-Muslim countries to register and periodically check in with immigration officers. Under NSEERS, not a single person was prosecuted for terrorist activity, although thousands were deported for overstaying their visas.

I asked Juliette Kayyem, who was President Obamas assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, why NSEERS was dismantled. Kayyem, who was on the team that ended NSEERS, says there were three principal reasons. First, changing technology, including biometrics, rendered the program irrelevant. Entire countries is a big pool, she offered, and it was both overinclusive and unhelpful to use national origin as a basis for exclusion. Second, by 2010 the threat of terror had changed: We realized that this whack-a-mole approach wasnt sufficient and that terrorists were coming from places that were our allies. Third, she says, Our friends hated [NSEERS]. It simply created a false narrative that we were in a holy war against our own allies.

Another prong of Kobachs proposed anti-Muslim strategy was to add extreme vetting questions for high-risk aliens including questioning them regarding support for Sharia law, jihad, equality of men and women. He also suggested reducing the intake of Syrian refugees to zero. Two of Kobachs three prongsthe extreme vetting questions and the zeroing-out of immigration from Syriaappear likely to be enacted right away by executive order.

Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says these arent small changes to immigration policy. In the macro sense, I am very concerned that we are moving back into a space of profiling based solely on religion and national origin, he told me. He described the plans outlined in the executive order as fear-based bad ideas rather than smart solutions to solvable problems.

I asked Warren whether he sees it as problematic that the executive order seems to prioritize Christian refugees from majority-Muslim countries, and his reply was definitive: By privileging Christians we are cementing the notion that the government action is based purely on religion. Its hard to dress this all up as a purely country-based ban, when you are separating one religion against another within the same country. Warren added that its demonstrably false to suggest that we can tell what a terrorist looks like based on his religion.

I think this is the beginning of the day American Muslims have been dreading.

Kayyem raises the same concern about giving special preference based on religion. The idea of protecting Christian minorities really is new, she says. As a counterintelligence expert, if we want to convince someone that there is a holy war, this is the way to do it. This idea, that Christians are more worthy than the vast majority of other victims who are Muslims, just deepens the problem.

The one element of Trumps immigration agenda that doesnt seem like it will get pushed through immediately is a Muslim registry of American citizens. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trumps pick for U.N. ambassador, repudiated that idea in her confirmation hearings last week. She did however, suggest support for something that sounds like NSEERS 2.0. What we need to do is make sure that we know exactly which countries are a threat, which ones have terrorism, and those are the ones we need to watch and be careful and vet, she said. That statement contradicted the testimony of Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, who had said at his confirmation hearing that while he ruled out a blanket ban on Muslim immigration, he would need more information before deciding whether to support a domestic registry of Muslims.

I asked Warren whether its time for Muslim Americans to be afraid based on Trumps moves on immigrants from majority-Muslim lands. I think this is the beginning of the day American Muslims have been dreading, he replied. This is a signal of a kind of second-class status from the new executive that is intolerable.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt put it more starkly. This is a sad day in America, he told me. Greenblatt continued:

If you are waiting for the Trump administration to come for the Muslims, its not going to look like the Japanese internment or the Nuremberg Laws. There may not be a registry to sign up for in solidarity. No. Its going to look like this: a creeping degradation of Islam as propounding a toxic ideology (in the parlance of the soon-to-be Attorney General Jeff Sessions), a creeping privileging of Christian refugees over Muslim ones, and a burgeoning belief that religious freedom as protected by the Constitution means that some faiths are more legitimate than others. More pointedly, as Warren suggests, you should be very afraid of a Trump administration that, effective Wednesday, has made good on its promise to separate members of one religion from another within the same nation. That didnt just happen in Syria and Iraq. It just happened in America as well.

Excerpt from:
Donald Trump's Executive Orders Are a Very Bad Sign for Muslims in America and Abroad - Slate Magazine

Over the past 12 or so hours, President Trump has made two major policy pronouncements via Twitter. On Tuesday night, he said he may send the Feds! to combat the carnage in Chicago, and on Wednesday morning, he said he plannedto launch a major investigation of voter fraud.

Both of these things can pretty easily be traced backto one source: Trump's television.

As the Huffington Post's Michael Calderone noted late Tuesday night, Trump's tweet about Chicago came shortly after Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly ran a segment using the exact same statistics. Here's the graphic O'Reilly showed:

And here's Trump's tweet:

228. 42. 24 percent. All were in the graphic on O'Reilly's show, which is a Trump favorite.

Earlier Tuesday afternoon, the idea of a voter-fraud investigation was a major, contentious theme of White House press secretary Sean Spicer's daily briefing. Three journalists pressed Spicer on a very logical question: If Trump truly believed that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential race, why hadn't he called for an investigation of this seemingly majorscandal?

During the daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that widespread voter fraud is a belief President Trump has "maintained for a while." (Reuters)

As Iwrote Tuesday,he's the president now, and he has professed severe concerns about election integrity and illegal immigrants. So his lack of a call for an investigation after more than two months of pushing this falsehood was conspicuous and suggested that he wasn't terribly serious about it.

Well, now he has called for one. Apparently in response to the heated back-and-forths atthe televised briefing and the ensuing coverage of those exchanges, Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that he will indeed push for an investigation. The Washington Post's Robert Costa reports that an unnamed Trump aide insists that this has been discussed for a while, but Spicer sure seemed to be slow-rolling the possibility on Tuesday.

Update: It's been brought to my attention that NBC's "Today" show ran a fact-check segment featuring chief legal correspondent Ari Melber just minutes before Trump's tweets, in which Melber saidthe lack of an investigation was "an inconsistency that is very hard to square. The segment ran starting at 7:07 a.m. Eastern time and featured a discussion of the lack of an investigation as the clock struck 7:10 a.m.; Trump tweeted about the investigation at 7:10.

So here we are again, in a situation in which Trump seems to bereacting in significant ways to what he sees on TV and in the media.

Last month,Trump tweeted about canceling Boeing's contract for the new Air Force One shortly after a Chicago Tribune article was posted that quoted Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenberg making comments critical of increasing opposition to free trade in other words, the position central toTrump's presidential bid. (Trump insisted that he hadn't seen the article.)

In November, Trump tweeted about how he'd like to punish flag-burners with loss of citizenship of jail time. About half an hour before, Fox News had aired a segment about students at a Massachusetts-based Hampshire College reportedly burning the flag in protest of Trump's election.

And that's to say nothing of his regular skewering of journalists and news media outlets whose stories and segments he hasn't approved of.

Trump himself has basically copped to this behavior. During the campaign, NBC's Chuck Todd asked him where he got his military advice, and his response was, I watch the shows. Hillary Clinton's campaign put it in an ad.

The difference now, though, is that he's in a position to actually make major policy decisions on it such as opening a large investigation and sending federal resources to urban areas.

Trump has made many bold Twitter pronouncements that appear to have fallen by the wayside statements about his political views and preferred policies that may reflectmomentary whims that will never find their way into official White House action. (Trump hasn't evenreally talked about flag-burning and Air Force One since his tweets in November and December.) And given the sheer volume of these proclamations, his supporters and even the media will probably forget many of them were ever made.

But when something happens like it did Tuesday at the White House news briefing, and Trump responds with a promise for a major investigation, it's impossible to ignore the fact that he's now in the position to make that happen quickly and to be held accountable if he doesn't.

We'll see if he actually follows through on either of the things he promised since Tuesday night or if they'll fade into Trump's news-making vortex. But if he does go forward with them, we'll know what set it in motion.

Read the original:
Donald Trump is making major policy pronouncements based on what he sees on TV - Washington Post

In a meeting with automakers Jan. 24, President Trump said that "it's the long term jobs that we're looking for." (The Washington Post)

President Trump told leaders of the countrys largest automakers Tuesday that he will curtail unnecessary environmental regulations and make it easier to build plants in the U.S., changes that he expects will shore up the manufacturing jobs he repeatedly promised to voters on the campaign trail.

After weeks of taunting the automotive industry over Twitter, Trump made a point to meet with the CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler just days into his term. He has pressured the companies to build more vehicles in the U.S. and hire more Americans into manufacturing jobs.

We have a very big push on to have auto plants and other plants, many other plants, youre not being singled out to have a lot of plants from a lot of different items built in the United States, Trump told executives Tuesday. Its happening. Its happening, bigly.

But Trumps efforts to increase U.S. auto manufacturing may require more than changes to environmental regulations or permits, said Kristin Dziczek, director of the industry, labor and economics group at the Center for Automotive Research.

Economics still favor building plants and hiring workers in Mexico, where labor is less expensive and there are fewer trade barriers. Whats more, Dziczek said the big automakers make investments knowing they will outlive any single president, regardless of what policies or regulations are put in place.

This industry has been around for 100 years, and plants last for 40 or 50 years or more, Dziczek said. They cant be swerving left and right every time there is a political change.

Chief executives Mary Barra of General Motors, Mark Fields of Ford and Sergio Marchionne of Fiat Chrysler attended the meeting, along with other top executives from their companies.

President Trump told the chief executives that environmental regulations are out of control and his administration will focus on real regulations that mean something while eliminating those that he finds inhospitable to business.

I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist. I believe in it, but its out of control, Trump said.

Executives declined to answer questions after the meeting, including whether the president cited any specific regulations he would cut. Only a portion of Tuesdays gathering was open to the press.

The industry contends that complying with increasingly stringent fuel economy standards increases the cost of making cars, which must then be passed on to buyers or compensated for with job cuts. Those regulations were introduced after the Obama administration rescued GM and Chrysler during the financial downturn and were upheld by the Environmental Protection Agency two weeks ago.

Safe Climate Campaign Director Daniel Becker said job creation doesnt need to come at the expense of regulations that have a positive impact on the environment. The fuel economy standards, in particular, help to save the consumers money at the gas pump and reduce the countrys dependence on oil, he said.

Despite the rhetoric there is often reason behind regulations, and in this case there is overwhelming evidence of how beneficial they are for consumers, the industry and overall Americans, Becker said.

Analysts have speculated that Trump could ease those regulations or others that impact the industry as a reward for companies creating more jobs in the U.S. Trump has also pledged to reduce corporate taxes, a move that would surely please executives.

There is a huge opportunity working together as an industry with government that we can improve the environment, improve safety, and improve jobs creation and the competiveness of manufacturing, Barra told reports after the meeting.

Fields told reporters that Trumps decision Monday to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a largely symbolic move since the deal was unlikely to pass Congress, was a sign of his desire to implement policies that improve competitiveness and create a renaissance in American manufacturing.

We have been very vocal both as an industry and as a company and we have repeatedly said that the mother of all trade barriers is currency manipulation, Fields said. TPP failed in meaningfully dealing with that and we appreciate the presidents courage to walk away from a bad trade deal.

Vice President Pence, Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Jared Kushner also attended Tuesdays meeting.

Though Trump spoke often on the campaign trail about the need to revive manufacturing across the economy, he narrowed in on the automotive industry in particular in the weeks following his election. He separately criticized Ford, GM and Toyota for plans to build certain cars in Mexico and then sell them in the U.S.

Trump threatened automotive companies that build abroad with a 35 percent tariff on goods imported to the U.S. for sale. Whether Trump has the power to impose such a tax on select companies has been called into question.

Conversely, Trump has also praised automakers who pledged to invest in the U.S. and add jobs here often taking credit for those decisions even when companies said they had been in the works for months or years. This month alone, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, GM, Toyota and Hyundai pledged to spend billions of dollars in the U.S. over the next several years on new factories, expanded production and hiring.

Trump met Monday with business leaders from a smattering of industries, including Fields and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk. The president reportedly told executives that he intends to eliminate a majority regulations and massively cut corporate taxes, but that in return those companies must keep production in the U.S. and preserve American jobs.

The CEOs were told to devise a series of actions that will boost U.S. manufacturing and submit those plans to Trump within the next 30 days.

David Nakamura contributed to this report.

Read more from The Washington Posts Innovations section.

Why the auto industrys big investments may have everything and nothing to do with Trump

Trump: German automakers will pay tariff on cars built outside U.S.

Why Ford says Donald Trump may be good for the auto industry

More here:
Donald Trump tells Detroit auto CEOs that environmental regulations are 'out of control' - Washington Post

On his fourth day in office, President Trump signed an executive order formally withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Crafted by the Obama administration, the trade deal failed to be ratified by Congress during Obama's two terms. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Donald Trump meant what he said about trade.

When he isn't getting attention for telling demonstrable falsehoods about the size of his inauguration crowd, Trump has been busy filling his administration with people who want to get tough on China, threatening to put tariffs on companies that outsource jobs, and, as he did on Monday, pulling the United States out of big trade deals. Indeed, he officially killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and is expected to announce that he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement as well.

How much does this matter? Well, when it comes to the TPP, maybe not as much as you might think for an agreement that would have created a single market for most of the Pacific rim other than China. At least not in economic terms. The U.S. International Trade Commission, after all, estimates that the TPP would have raised our inflation-adjusted incomes only by 0.23 percent in total between now and 2032. That's not nothing, but it's pretty darn close. That's because the TPP wasn't really about reducing tariffs. Those are already quite low for the countries involved. It was more about making other countries follow our rules for patents and intellectual property, raising prices for Asian consumers and profits for American companies. That'd be better for our shareholders, but not necessarily for our workers. In all likelihood, it wouldn't change our jobs picture very much for good or ill.

No, the real reason to support the TPP wasn't economics so much as geopolitics. It was about keeping an economic foot firmly planted in China's backyard, and writing the trade rules so they couldn't. If this sounds like a less quantifiable benefit, well, that's because it is. At the same time, though, this kind of logic was a part of almost all our trade deals the past 70 years. Initially, these were about setting a system to promote prosperity abroad so fragile postwar democracies could resist Communist pressure. But even after the Berlin Wall came down, they were still a way to not only open up markets, but also reward countries for reforming their economies like we wanted. As Paul Krugman argued at the time, that was why NAFTA made more sense than any economic model would have told you. If we rejected Mexico's liberalizing government, it might have collapsed and an anti-American one could have taken its place.

Now, that's not to say that all trade deals are economically irrelevant. They aren't. NAFTA really did move a decentchunk of our manufacturing base south of the border, whether a giant sucking sound accompanied it. And granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status in 2000 really did seem to give companies the confidence they needed to shift production thereon a far larger scale than they had before, sincethey no longer had toworry about the risk of tariffs rising.

What we are saying, though, is that the era of big trade deals is over. And that was true even before Trump announced his candidacy before a raucous crowd of paid actors. The simple story is that we've already pushed tariffs about as low as they can go, and all that's left is to negotiate over non-tariff trade barriers. But the problem is that those sorts of things say, rules about intellectual property or government procurement are what we used to think of as the sole province of domestic policy. Which is why they can feel like they're infringing on a country's sovereignty. The result is that these new trade deals are more difficult politically and less useful economically than previous ones.

But what's changing with Trump is that we aren'teven trying to lead on trade anymore. He doesn't see thesedeals as a way to win friends and influence people, but rather to win manufacturing jobs and influence his approval rating. That might sound like common sense to some people, but it does leave an opening for other countries yes, China to negotiate where we're not. The risk, then, is that globalization might not proceed on our terms or with our values. But there's a greater danger. It's not that Trump won't make further progress on trade, but rather will backtrack on where we are. New trade deals might not help much, but unraveling old ones would hurt. At that point, we wouldn't have the luxury of worrying about whose globalization we had. The answer wouldbe nobody's. And the whole world would be a little bit poorer.

Or as Trump calls it, America would be great again.

See the article here:
Donald Trump just forfeited in his first fight with China - Washington Post

Imagine youre a member of Donald Trumps administration, or a Republican member of Congress. Whats the most important question youre asking yourself right now?

Theres a good chance its this: How can I manipulate the president into doing what I want him to do?

This may be the most important question in Washington as a whole, because this is a president like no other.

Lets take a few news items weve seen just in the past day or so:

The picture were getting is of a president spending long stretches of time watching television, consumed with anger at slights real or imagined, as aides and other political actors circle around him trying to find a way to use his capricious whims to their advantage or at least minimize the damage he can do. The agenda is liable to be seized by whatever happens to be bothering Trump that day, whether its the size of the crowd at his inaugural or the fact that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for him, both profound threats to his ego that he cant seem to let go of.

President Trump questioned media reports and photographs that showed the size of Inauguration Day crowds, speaking to CIA employees at CIA headquarters on Jan. 21 in Langley, Va. (The Washington Post)

Even apart from the substance of these reports is the fact that the Trump administration is already leaking like a sieve, as people within the inner circle voice their frustration, jockey for position, and use the press to discredit their rivals. Yes, in every administration there are competitions for the presidents ear and internal squabbles as people try to maximize their influence. Whats remarkable is how in this one theyre becoming public so quickly and that even his loyalists are treating the president like a child whose disturbing behavior has to be managed.

Trumps personal quirks and weaknesses could turn ordinary internal conflicts into outright chaos. Because he not only knows so little about policy but seems to have few fixed beliefs, his public statements are completely unpredictable. So he might say that Republicans will give insurance for everybody, leaving both administration spokespeople and members of Congress scrambling to explain a promise they have no intention of keeping.

It isnt just that Trump is uninterested in policy. To take one comparison, Ronald Reagan didnt much care about the details either. But Reagan had a clear ideological vision that guided his administration, and it wasnt hard to predict what hed think about any particular proposal or action. In the Trump administration, on the other hand, you have traditional Republicans who will sometimes be at odds with the nationalist/populist cohort led by Steve Bannon, and which side the president favors at a given moment could be determined by something the nincompoops on Fox & Friends said that morning.

That means that most of the time, no one can claim or believe that theyre carrying out Trumps true wishes or agenda, since those are subject to complete revision at a moments notice. Thats not exactly a recipe for a smoothly efficient administration. Instead, it may wind up with dozens or even hundreds of power centers spread throughout the government, each pursuing its own agenda, sometimes in concert, sometimes in conflict.

At the moment theres an almost comical element to all that, and Democrats might take some solace in it. After all, its better to face an adversary at war with itself than one that knows exactly what it wants to do and how to do it. But what happens when the Trump administration confronts a crisis, as it surely will before long? To just take one example, Trump has repeatedly said that NATO is obsolete and suggested that if one of its members were threatened he might not come to its defense. Yet Secretary of Defense James Mattis just told the British defense minister that America has an unshakable commitment to NATO. So which is it? We may not find out until Vladimir Putin invades Estonia.

So the shape of the Trump administration could be determined less by a vision the president himself is guided by than by how skillful each faction of inside players is at manipulating him. Its not exactly reassuring.

Read more:
The coming struggle for control of Donald Trump's mind - Washington Post (blog)