Mick Hartley

The dust's beginning to settle – for the moment. Michael Totten reflects on that Executive Order, and what it says about the Trump presidency:

If we’d had Donald Trump’s policy on the books without interruption for the past 100 years, not a single American life would have been saved….

The radical left is doing what it does best—hyperventilating about a rising Nazi regime in America. As if the United States and its allies killed millions of Germans in the 1940s because a clown like Donald Trump saddled up in Berlin.

Even so, it’s clear now that the White House was far more interested in imposing the most draconian ban possible than in protecting American citizens….

American diplomats in Baghdad are warning us—to no avail whatsoever—that our delicate military and political ties are in jeopardy right in the middle of the war against ISIS. You don’t have to take their word for it. Listen to Iraqi General Talib al Kenani in his interview with CBS News. “I’m a four-star general, and I’m banned from entering the U.S.? I have been fighting terrorism for 13 years and winning. Now my kids are now asking if I’m a terrorist? There are many American troops here in Iraq. After this ban how are we supposed to deal with each other? We thought we were partners with our American friends, and now we realize that we’re just considered terrorists.”

The very people we need to keep on our side in the Middle East feel like we hate them, and they aren’t imagining things. The president’s most strident supporters clearly do hate them. The mood in America has grown so alarmingly vicious and reactionary lately that I had to close my comment section for the first time in fifteen years. I will not even consider turning it back on until Donald Trump is out of the White House. The volume of nastiness and hostility is so overwhelming that the entire world is hearing it now that it has a champion in the White House. It’s going to blow back in our faces in ways that we haven’t even figured out yet.  

“It’s a very dangerous thing,” writes Hoover Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes, “to have a White House that can’t with the remotest pretense of competence and governance put together a major policy document on a crucial set of national security issues without inducing an avalanche of litigation and wide diplomatic fallout.”…

So what’s the real problem with the president’s executive order? The real problem is that President Donald J. Trump has proven himself to be a man who will replace foreign policy, national security, domestic tranquility and America’s reputation with manipulative axe-grinding political drama. “But Hillary” will cut it no more. She is irrelevant now.

Those of us who hoped against the longest of odds that he would grow up and pivot can’t anymore. We know him now as a president and not just a candidate. The gravity of the job is not inspiring him to rise to the majesty of his office. He’s not just boasting about grabbing women by the pussy and yukking it up at sports arenas before howling mobs demanding he throw his political opponent in prison. He’s actually governing now, and he is doing so as a chaos engine.

The Trump era in American history will be every bit as aggressively ugly and stupid as the majority of American voters feared it would be.