http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39298-sowing-mayhem-to-reap-power-the-sinister-strategy-behind-trump-s-muslim-ban
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With Muslim Ban, Trump and Bannon Wanted Chaos, but Not Resistance
Tuesday, January 31, 2017 By Laleh Khalili, Truthout | News Analysis
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 visas, indefinitely.
Second, it suspended entry into the US for a period of four months for
citizens of seven countries -- Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria
and Yemen -- even for those already holding valid visas. Third, it also
imposed restrictions on the entry of green card holders from the same
seven states, leaving it to the discretion of US Customs and Border
Protection agents to decide whether or not they can enter the country.
Fourth, it was thought that the order also imposed a four-month ban on
citizens of the same seven countries who also simultaneously hold a
passport from another non-banned state as well. At the time of this
writing it is not entirely clear whether all or just some dual citizens
are subjected to the four-month ban.
The executive order drew on the language and premises of a bill titled
Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention, signed
into law by president Obama on December 18, 2015 (after having passed
the House by a vote of 407-19). The law delineated exceptions to the
existing US visa waiver program, whereby people holding both the
passports of the aforementioned seven countries -- –Iran, Iraq, Libya,
Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen -- and passports of countries entitled
to visa waiver would not have automatic access to visa waiver and would
have to formally apply for visas for entry to the US. The seven
countries designated by Obama for stricter entry criteria are the same
seven countries in the Trump Muslim ban executive order. And the seven
countries are geopolitical adversaries of the United States, none of the
citizens of which have committed terrorist offenses on US soil.
More than any other executive order signed by Trump in the furious
flurry of his first week in office, the context and content of the
Muslim ban executive order provides an exemplary and worrying optic into
the operations of the Trump White House.
The first and foremost explanation for the expeditious, indeed
whiplash-rapid, use of executive prerogative is Trump's interest in
signaling to his base. In this case, the segment of the base to whom the
order appeals is the unabashedly xenophobic white nationalists. The
order was signed on Holocaust Memorial Day. Not coincidentally (though
astonishingly), the White House press release commemorating the day
includes no mention of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This
denigration of Muslims and Jews is par for the course of white
nationalists who support Trump. Second, the Muslim ban -- alongside the
border wall with Mexico -- has been from the start the most provocative
of Trump's campaign promises. Throughout the campaign, it provoked the
most protests, and Trump supporters consistently cited it as the reason
he was to be distinguished from his "politically correct" rivals and
supported. Both the ban and the wall are the concrete manifestations of
Trump's slogan "America First." That slogan echoes the name of a 1940s
anti-Semitic national organization, with its primary base in the
Midwest, whose isolationist aim was to prevent the US from countering
Nazi Germany. The sentiment of this slogan is also at the core of Steve
Bannon's white nationalist ideology.
The content of the ban itself is notable. Though the seven countries are
the same as those included in the 2015 Obama legislation, now the order
attempts to go further still and grant border agents discretionary power
to exclude US green card holders, in effect denying residency to some
Muslims who had already legally obtained it. As Rudy Giuliani has
gleefully explained on Fox News:
When [Trump] first announced it, he said, "Muslim ban." He called
me up. He said, "Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do
it legally." I put a commission together with Judge [Mike] Mukasey, with
Congressman [Mike] McCaul, [Rep.] Pete King; whole group of very expert
lawyers on this. And what we did was, we focused on -- instead of
religion, danger! The areas of the world that create danger for us!
Which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal,
perfectly sensible. And that's what the ban is based on.
It is not clear whether Giuliani's boasts about his role in drawing up
the Muslim ban order are borne out by facts, since The New York Times
reports that Bannon had in fact been in charge of drafting the executive
order as early as a year ago.
In the aftermath of the massive backlash -- including massive popular
demonstrations and emergency lawsuits to stay the order -- the Trump
White House has doubled down on the order and has indicated that Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and other countries may also be added to the list of
countries whose citizens will be banned from entry into the US.
The Chaotic Release of the Executive Order
Just as notable as the content of the Muslim ban executive order is its
release procedure. The actual order was preceded by days of speculation
and rumors and multiple versions of leaked drafts, laying the groundwork
for the final version through sowing terror and confusion about what was
to come. While the various versions floated about on social and
mainstream media, according to CNN, neither the Office of Legal Counsel
(OLC) nor any department heads were consulted on the final text of the
order. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials only saw
the text shortly before it was released. On Sunday, according to The New
York Times, the White House insisted that the OLC had cleared the
document (though no confirmation from the OLC itself was forthcoming),
while the DHS issued a confusing press release which said that DHS will
continue to enforce the ban, while also pledging to follow judicial orders.
The executive order was released with immediate effect on Friday
afternoon, effectively allowing for facts on the ground to develop over
the weekend in a state of chaos. The text of the executive order was not
released for hours, while in the interim, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway
told a television interviewer that the text may never be released.
According to CNN and The New York Times, it took hours for the White
House to clarify for the benefit of agencies that were to implement the
order how the order was to be interpreted, while the DHS did not receive
the list of the countries included in the order until 3 am on Saturday
morning. On Saturday, Bannon and Miller overruled the DHS interpretation
of the order and demanded that green card holders be subjected to
screening and their entry into the US be determined on a case-by-case
basis by border agents. Also on Saturday, the State Department announced
that foreign dual citizens of the same seven states would also be
excluded from the US.
The execution of the order depended largely on the discretion of the
officers of Customs and Border Protection. Notably, during his campaign,
Trump had received the overwhelming endorsement of National Immigration
and Customs Enforcement Council, a union representing 5,000 federal
immigration officers, as well as the National Border Patrol Council, the
union representing border agents. In fact, these border agents displayed
an extraordinary zealotry in interpreting and enforcing the order, and
even after a federal judge ordered a stay (which I'll discuss more
below), according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other
civil rights lawyers, some customs agents refused to obey the court at
airports in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, blocking attorneys' access
to their clients.
What the Trump White House had not counted on was the overwhelming
resistance organized in opposition to this executive order on Saturday.
As the news of denied entries -- especially for green card holders got
out -- all major international airports in the US, and particularly JFK
in New York, saw massive protests organized by coalitions of refugees'
rights activists, Black Lives Matter-related groups, and Muslim and
other civil rights groups. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance issued a
statement in support of the immigrants, refugees and protesters, and
refused to drop off at or pick up from JFK. Meanwhile, when a refugee
assistance organization put out a call for legal assistance for detained
refugees, some 3,000 lawyers volunteered their services. The order was
seen as so egregious that even a number of CEOs and corporate
spokespersons voiced their opposition to it, including Mark Zuckerberg
of Facebook and Tim Cook of Apple, and the Twitter social media person.
While Uber was seen to break the New York Taxi Workers Alliance strike,
Lyft, which was not seen to cross the picket line, announced a $1
million donation to the ACLU, and Sergey Brin of Google showed up to
protest at the San Francisco airport.
The ACLU and its allies in New York immediately filed a lawsuit
(Darweesh vs. Trump) on behalf of an Iraqi interpreter who had worked
with the US military, and in Boston, on behalf of two Iranian professors
and green card holders at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. In
Virginia, some 60 claimants lodged a petition for a temporary
restraining order against the executive order, while in Seattle, the
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a petition on behalf of two
unnamed claimants for a stay of the order. In Los Angeles a lawsuit was
filed on behalf of a deported Iranian national holding a valid visa. In
all cases, some relief was granted to the petitioners. In Massachusetts,
the most liberal ruling ordered a stay to deportations and detentions
for seven days, before which another hearing would be scheduled. The Los
Angeles ruling was similarly broad, and in fact, ordered the respondents
to return the deported claimant back to the US. In Seattle, a stay was
granted and a further hearing set for February 3. In Virginia, the judge
ordered that the detainees be granted access to legal counsel and
another hearing be scheduled within seven days. The most restrictive
order was the one granted in New York, which granted relief only to
those already detained, and did not affect the 120-day ban on citizens
of Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya or Yemen, or the indefinite ban on
Syrian refugees.
In the aftermath of the rulings, Canada announced that after approaching
Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, Flynn had said that foreign
dual nationals of the seven states were in fact not subject to a ban,
while the White House reversed its ban on green card holders. The UK
issued guidance to the effect that the ban did not apply to dual
citizens of the UK and one of the seven countries. At the time of this
writing, it is not clear whether Canada and the UK are the only
countries whose dual citizens are exempted from the ban.
A Strategy That Entrenches Rule by Fiat
Though a number of political observers have claimed that the chaos
created by this process is a sign of the incompetence of the Trump
administration, there is another, far more sinister, take on the
proceedings. The Muslim ban executive order is the perfect prototype for
the anti-democratic political process Trump and his chief strategist and
advisor seem to be putting into place.
This political process is distinguished by a number of characteristics:
First, the opacity of the executive orders and the various draft
versions that precede them are not just side effects of incompetent
management. Upon closer scrutiny, they appear intended to produce
orchestrated chaos. This kind of havoc supplies the uncertainty and
arbitrariness that are necessary for rule by fiat, a process to which
Trump and his advisers' authoritarian style is perfectly suited. The
uncertainty -- about how the order is to be interpreted, to what
countries it applies, whether US residents are subjected to it or not
and so on -- is instrumental in forestalling a coherent legal challenge.
Second, the relentlessness of Trump's exercise of executive prerogative
works to bulldoze over any possible formal or institutional dissent. It
is noteworthy that on the same day or a day after the Muslim ban
executive order, Trump also issued various other memoranda and orders,
the most significant of which downgraded the participation of the
director of National Intelligence and the chairman of Joint Chiefs of
Staff in the principals committee of the National Security Council
(NSC), making their attendance not a regular feature of the principals
committee meeting, but only predicated on the meeting agenda. At the
same time, Bannon was elevated to regular attendance of the principals
committee, something no political adviser of a president has done
before. The assumption is that if a congressional opposition is busy
dealing with the fallout of the Muslim ban order, they will not have the
time or the inclination to address the changes to the makeup of the NSC.
Further, the arbitrariness and the relentlessness factors are likely
both intended to demoralize any further opposition.
Third, the multi-pronged attack on the institutions of the state and on
mechanisms of public control over them depend on three things: (a) a
well-functioning bureaucracy which operates smoothly and absorbs new
orders in an orderly fashion; (b) the acquiescence or support of the
private sector; and (c) a grey zone in the interstices of laws and
administrative procedures, where honorable politicians are expected to
act according to existing norms and customs of governance.
As regards bureaucracy, Trump's strategy (or likely that of his
advisers) has been diabolically intelligent. Those federal agencies that
may have posed a threat to the Trump White House have been defanged from
the very outset, and given the ways in which bureaucracies are intended
to follow law and executive power, these defanged agencies -- the US
Environmental Protection Agency foremost among them -- have had to
acquiesce to the funding cuts, hiring freeze and gag rules. There have
been reports that the top diplomats in the State Department were purged
in anticipation of their dissent against the Muslim Ban. On Monday,
January 30, Trump fired the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, who
had instructed Justice Department lawyers to not comply with the Muslim
Ban executive order, because of its illegality.
In addition to silencing any bureaucrats, diplomats or agencies whose
remit threatens the Trump/Bannon agenda, Trump's inner circle has relied
on the complicity, in fact zealotry, of the bureaucrats and officers in
the border protection and immigration agencies, who have shown
themselves to be supporters of the president. Their vehemence in fact
has made it possible for the White House to rely on the border officers
for the most restrictive and bigoted interpretation of the order.
Like sympathetic agency bureaucrats, many corporations have fallen into
line with the ban. Uber drivers broke the yellow cab strike at the JFK
airport. Lufthansa and Qatar Airways are reported to have turned away
even green card holders from the seven states at the departure counters
(unlike other airlines which allowed green card holders to proceed to
the US border). In fact, the market as a whole has jubilantly responded
to a Trump presidency, with various market indices rising on the news of
some of Trump's executive orders, foremost among them the order to build
a wall on the border with Mexico, which will act as a boon for
construction and security sectors.
The Trump/Bannon strategy also takes advantage of informality of norms
and the honor system. Ethics rules are quietly scrapped. Trump refuses
to place his businesses in trust because there are no laws to this
effect, and adherence to the norm depends on the honor of the elected
official. In fact, the prerogative of the president to sign executive
orders itself operates in this grey zone of informality, usually made to
conform to the law by the advice of the OLC or other legal bodies. What
the Trump White House has done is to do away with interagency
fact-finding, consultation and coordination, with usual channels of
communication with the public and government officials, and even with
seeking legal advice on controversial orders.
What all these steps are intended to achieve is a downgrading of the
democratic public. An aware and politicized public controls the levers
of the state and insists on its political and socioeconomic interests
being met in the halls of power. It insists on electoral methods that do
not erase its majority through machinations of archaic institutions,
such as the Electoral College, or deny its votes through gerrymandering
and voter suppression. This politicized and conscious public would be a
threat to the extremist white nationalist agenda of Trump/Bannon.
The one factor that the Trump administration seems not to have
considered in its infernal calculus is the existence of precisely this
kind of public, best demonstrated in the wave of protests that greeted
international flights since Saturday. The protests have been so strong,
so continuous and so widespread that they have even compelled formerly
servile Democratic lawmakers -- many of whom had voted for all Trump
nominees with little protest -- to begin voicing their opposition to the
Muslim ban, first hesitantly, and as the protests have grown, more
confidently. As long as organizers continue to organize, politicize new
protesters and hold the feet of the Trump administration and of the two
parties to the fire, the chances of Bannon's Mephistophelian plan for
dissolution of a public voice can still be stymied.