The morning after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against lifting the temporary stay levied against Donald Trump’s immigration ban, against which he immediately tweeted about Thursday evening, the president came to his senses and addressed the matter in a far more careful manner. Or at least that’s what the media at large may have said, had Trump not started his day with a tweet referencing a Lawfare article’s assessment of the appeals court decision, which he dubbed “disgraceful.”
“A disgraceful decision!” the president exclaimed after quoting a pertinent passage from the article, which read: “Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.” Yet as the Washington Post pointed out, had Trump actually read the Lawfare post instead of regurgitating what he thought it said based on a Morning Joe segment he evidently watched, perhaps he would’ve realized editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes actually agreed with the court’s assessment of his immigration ban.
Huffington Post’s Ethan Klapper noticed the closeness of Trump’s tweet to Morning Joe‘s reporting the Lawfare article:
Here we go — @Morning_Joe full screen at 8:03. Trump tweet at 8:15 pic.twitter.com/OApcgSIiZY
— Ethan Klapper (@ethanklapper) February 10, 2017
The president’s penchant for watching cable news reports and responding to them on Twitter is well documented. Unfortunately for Trump this time around, that he didn’t read Wittes’ full article is all too obvious. As the Washington Post noted, Wittes “takes issue with some of what the federal appellate court judges said (and didn’t say)” but “ultimately decides that the court made the right call.” As proof, they do what neither Morning Joe nor Trump did and offer an additional quote from the article:
The Ninth Circuit is correct to leave the TRO [temporary restraining order] in place, in my view, for the simple reason that there is no cause to plunge the country into turmoil again while the courts address the merits of these matters over the next few weeks. Are there tea leaves to read in this opinion? There sure are, particularly with respect to the judges’ analysis of the government’s likelihood of prevailing on the merits and its blithe dismissal of the government’s claims of national security necessity on pages 26-27 — a matter on which the per curiam spends only one sentence and one brief footnote.
Oops. Meanwhile, Wittes took the opportunity to roast Trump on Twitter, wondering if the president “would consider tweeting the conclusion of the essay he quoted.” (For the record, he uses the word “incompetent” — among many others — to describe Trump’s executive order and the process behind its creation.)
(Via Washington Post and Lawfare)