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In the chaotic hours after President Trump signed on a Friday afternoon the sloppily written executive order meant to fulfill his Muslim ban campaign promise, Stephen Miller called the home of Robert Capers to dictate to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District how he should defend that order at a Saturday emergency federal court hearing.
That’s according to a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the call, which happened as Department of Justice attorneys cancelled plans, found babysitters and rushed back to their Brooklyn office to try and find out what exactly it was they were defending and who was being affected by it — how many people were already being held in America, how many were being barred from arriving here and the exact status of each person.
Y’know, the information a competent administration would have been prepared to collect before implementing the order.
The Eastern District declined to comment on any contact between Capers and Miller, the 31-year-old former Jeff Sessions aide and America First true believer with no legal background of his own, who a few months ago was warming up Trump’s campaign crowds and is now writing executive orders for the President to sign.
We know that Capers didn’t refuse or resign but kept the stuff rolling downhill. It landed on his civil division chief, Susan Riley, who appeared herself Saturday, perhaps to protect attorneys in her shop from the humiliation of publicly telling a federal judge on behalf of the White House that she had no clue what she was talking about.
“This has unfolded with such speed,” Riley said in court, while asking for the order to remain in effect, “that we haven’t had an opportunity to address the issues, the important legal issues.” Or, she added, to even say how many people were being held.
The judge then stayed Trump’s order, as did another federal judge in a separate hearing the same night. Weeks later, a unanimous decision by a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld a third stay. Several of the judges who’ve ruled against Trump’s order now reportedly have around-the-clock police protection.
The President wrathfully ripped one “so-called judge” who ruled against him and declared that the blood from any terror attack now would be on the hands of the judiciary. Now he says a new executive order is coming — a do-over , damn the courts.
That’s not how it works, since the legal issues the ongoing suits raise won’t all just disappear when Trump issues a new order. But it shows how hard it is to distinguish sloppiness from nastiness, clumsiness from willful disruption, in this terribly new, terribly different administration led by a President with no prior governing experience.
The progressives who were all a-giggle as this chaos agent exposed the hollowed-out hacks of the Republican Party back in the primary can’t say they weren’t warned. No one can, not after a year and a half of candidate Trump demeaning American institutions and insulting disabled reporters, old war heroes, Mexican-American judges, stupid Iowans and even the Pope.
So it’s been nice to see the campaign counter-punching champ take hits from the courts and in the polls as President. He’s learning the hard way that it’s tough to keep fighting the power once you are the power. (Bill de Blasio, who’s gearing up for his reelection bid this year by pretending he’s running against Trump, struggles with the same dilemma.)
But it’s damn late after November to keep underestimating Trump’s ability to profit from the chaos he creates, and damn is he good at creating it.
The administration on Friday dismissed as “100% false” an AP report about a draft executive order to activate the National Guard to round up immigrants . The Department of Homeland Security says the wire was wrong to report that Secretary John Kelly wrote the round-up order, and that it was never seriously considered. But we know that Kelly, like Capers, will carry out whatever half-baked orders Trump signs.
We know that Trump wants to speak not truth, but fear, to power. And that there will be events that spread fear.
At his epic press conference Thursday, Trump said the travel ban “had a very smooth roll-out” hampered only by a “bad court” and that his White House was a “fine-tuned machine” hampered only by “working so hard just putting out fires that are fake fires” lit by journalists trying to fool the American people about his “incredible progress.”
Four weeks in, the President who sold himself as “the only one” who can protect the nation from “American carnage” is musing out loud about fake fires, as officials defend the indefensible on his behalf.
harrysiegel@gmail.com
Update: “Stephen Miller did not speak to Robert Capers,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters said Tuesday, two days after this story was published. “They have never spoken to one another.”