If there's one saving grace to the Trump presidency, it's that Trump sucks at his job. This isn't exactly surprising, considering anytime Trump directly led a company with his name on it it quickly went bankrupt, but still, there's a small comfort in knowing that someone with such a long history of executive failure has learned absolutely nothing from the experience. Who knew that Trump's pathological inability to admit to failure could actually be a boon? If he isn't going to adapt or improve himself, he can't really be all that effective, which, like I said, is at least something to be optimistic about.
That incompetence was on full display in every aspect of the creation and implementation of his Muslim Ban executive order. The act is the first real, concrete policy Trump has followed through on and it has fallen apart in an almost embarrassing easy way. From it's muddled and confused implementation to its patently off-the-top-of-their-head legal defense, it is incredibly obvious that no one in the Administration actually took five minutes to think about what would happen once the order was put into effect. I say this because it's really difficult for me to accept that the best legal argument the Justice Department could come up with would be to stand up in front of a judge and say with a straight face that banning people from countries that have literally never been involved in any terrorist attack on the U.S. is in the interest of national security, totally, that's all that it is. That their (ahem) trump card when that argument failed would be "Well, it's national security and stuff, so, uh, the courts don't have a right to rule on that. So there," is proof enough to me that nobody at Justice actually had the chance to look at the order and prepare themselves for the inevitable challenges that would follow.
It is also isn't hard to accept that no lawyer or legal expert looked at the order before it went out, either. Because if they had, they probably would've mentioned that banning people with green cards and visas- a.k.a people who have already been granted the legal right to enter the country- is an easily exploitable legal issue to shut down the whole order. They would've also pointed out that shutting out potentially tens of thousands of people from entering the country without any due process for said people to challenge their exclusion is also incredibly shaky legal ground to stand on and won't survive the first person to challenge it. But it honest-to-goodness looks like Trump et al. did nothing to avoid these pitfalls because the idea that someone would try to stop them never seems to have crossed their mind.
Which is mind-boggling when you think about it. The Muslim Ban was already one of the most controversial aspects of a Trump presidency when the idea spilled out of his mouth in the primaries. And yet, the Administration was still caught flat-footed by the counter-punch virtually anyone with skin the game promised would immediately come if he made that policy a reality. So, the question becomes, if the President is this incapable of handling the obvious challenges to his policies, what's he going to do when an actual curve-ball comes his way?
Sure, it's nice to be snarky about how his first signature proposal is going down in flames. And it's also fun to snipe at the Republicans shitting bricks over the political consequences of something they've been threatening for seven years now. Sadly, the nature of the job means that we are going to need Trump to make a good decision about something, at some point. That our main hope legitimately seems to be that since he is so incredibly dumb he may bungle his own fuck-ups and thus limit their damage is the opposite of comforting. Then again, we wouldn't really need hope if we had something good to look forward to, would we?
Of course, there is an alternative. I could be wrong about everything, and the response the Trump team took could actually be the result of many long, carefully thought out conversations. I don't really want to consider this option because if this is what the best the Trump administration can do, on purpose, then the possibility of what could happen when they have to make a decision on the fly with no time to think is just too goddamn depressing to think about.
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