Comment & Debate
Benjamin Wittes, “Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas”, Lawfare, January 28, 2017: “I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose… in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives. When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point.”