5: How Will Trump Revise His Travel Ban to Make It Acceptable to the Courts?
An immigration law expert explains how the president could take another stab at limiting travel from certain countries.
On Friday, a day after an appeals court ruled that Donald Trump’s temporary ban on refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries should remain suspended for now, it was reported that the Trump administration may be writing a new version of the executive order. That could be a sign that the White House is preparing for the eventuality of losing a Supreme Court battle—in case the sweeping executive order is struck down, Trump will have the option of signing a similar order, but one that that won’t get suplexed by tag-teaming federal judges as soon as the government tries to implement it.
It remains uncertain whether the government will appeal the decision to suspend the ban, and of course the issue of whether the ban is legal has yet to be unresolved. But common sense suggests that a more carefully considered and implemented order restricting immigration would have a better chance of prevailing in court. Though the president has broad powers when it comes to immigration, anything Trump does will likely be challenged by liberal state attorneys general and civil rights groups. And since judges will surely remember Trump’s “total and complete shutdown” speech back in 2015, the president will have to persuade courts that he’s not trying to implement a “Muslim ban” by another name.Vice News
4: DARK ESSAYS BY WHITE HOUSE STAFFER ARE THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCE CODE OF TRUMPISM
LET’S SAY YOU ARE a top official on the National Security Council and Donald Trump requests a memo explaining the purpose of his chaotic presidency. What are the odds you would draft a 4,000-word essay arguing that America is like a doomed aircraft that’s been hijacked by terrorists in which Trump has madly rushed the cockpit and seized the controls but we still might die because he doesn’t know how to fly the plane?
That would be an unusual memo, even if its first paragraph didn’t actually evoke the tragedy of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 after its passengers tried to wrest control of the jet from its al Qaeda hijackers. Yet a senior member of the NSC named Michael Anton has written precisely that justification of the Trump presidency — not as an NSC memo, but as an anonymous article for an arch-conservative website, published two months before the election, when Anton was still a private citizen.
The article, headlined “The Flight 93 Election,” caused a minor stir when it came out. Conservatives who didn’t like Trump were aghast at its strange endorsement of the brutish candidate, while liberals thought it showed the crackpot essence of the conservative case for the reality TV star. There was also the buzz of a guessing game: Who wrote this incredible thing? Here’s how the article began:
3: Is Trump leading the US on a warpath with Iran?
On a spring morning in 2016, a retired four-star general, who was forced out of his job by then-President Barack Obama, spoke before defence and foreign policy experts gathered just blocks from the White House.
The 65-year old speaker, with silver hair and puffy eyes, was blunt. For all the dangers al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, known as ISIS) pose in the Middle East, he warned that the Iranian regime “is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace”.
He recalled that as commander of US troops in the Middle East, the first three questions he would ask his subordinates every morning “had to do with Iran and Iran and Iran”.
“We only pray, the rest of us outside this town, that someone good is listening here,” he told the Washington crowd, as he issued an ominous prediction: “The future is going to be ghastly”, and that “the next president is going to inherit a mess”.
Aljazeera
2: Al Franken repeats senators’ concern that Trump is ‘not right mentally’
Al Franken has repeated his contention that some of his fellow senators think Donald Trump is “not right mentally”.
“A few” Republicans are so concerned, the Minnesota Democrat told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “It’s not the majority of them, it’s a few.”
Such concerns are expressed, he said, “in the way all of us have this suspicion. He lies a lot, he says things that aren’t true, that’s the same as lying I guess”.
Franken singled out Trump’s oft-repeated, evidence-free claims that mass voter fraud cost him a popular vote victory against Hillary Clinton. Clinton won nearly three million more ballots than Trump in November but lost in the electoral college.
The Guardian
1: Famine looms in four countries as aid system struggles to cope, experts warn
Famine is looming in four different countries, threatening unprecedented levels of hunger and a global crisis that is already stretching the aid and humanitarian system like never before, experts and insiders warn.
Tens of millions of people in need of food aid in Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia are at the mercy not only of an overwhelmed aid system but also the protracted, mainly conflict-driven crises in their own countries, the humanitarian leaders say.
While the generosity of donors has risen sixfold over the past 20 years, unprecedented levels of humanitarian suffering have overtaken financial support. Donor funding reached a record high last year but only half of the requirements were met, according to the UN’s humanitarian chief, Stephen O’Brien.
The Guardian
