Trump Administration's Incompetence (Thank God)

“The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.” See below.

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by Ilya Somin, entitled "Making America cruel again – Trump’s executive order on refugees."

President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on refugees is both cruel and counterproductive. It inflicts great harm on many thousands of people while simultaneously endangering national security.

Somin goes on:

The White House claims that the order is intended to protect the US against terrorism. But any such risk is extremely small already. The average American has only about a 1 in 3.6 billion per year chance of being killed by an immigrant terrorist of any kind, Muslim or non-Muslim, refugee or otherwise. That is far less than the odds being killed by a lightning strike.

On net, Trump’s order actually increases the risk to national security far more than it might reduce it. Trump and his supporters are not the only ones who want to keep Syrian refugees out of the US. The leaders of ISIS feel exactly the same way. They want to prevent Muslims from fleeing to the West so as not to reduce the number of people living under ISIS rule, and also because they fear that refugees might be influenced by Western liberal values inimical to radical Islamism. Trump’s order plays into ISIS’ hands, both by keeping out refugees and by needlessly antagonizing Muslims around the world.

Trump’s order also benefits terrorists because it keeps out Iraqis and Syrians who helped US forces, often risking their own lives in the process. If you were an Iraqi or Syrian considering helping the US, would you trust American promises of refuge after this order? I don’t think I would. Intelligence and other assistance from members of the local population is essential to combatting terrorists and insurgents. Don’t take my word for it. Take that of the US military’s counterinsurgency manual, coauthored by General James Mattis, the newly confirmed secretary of defense (one of Trump’s few good appointees). Thanks to Donald Trump, US forces are now less likely to get that kind of support.

But we're lucky, to some extent, that Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, et al, are completely incompetent at what they're doing:

The one silver lining of Trump’s order is that its incompetent drafting leaves it vulnerable to various legal challenges. Already, opponents have already secured four federal court orders suspending various parts of the order, and there may be more such rulings in the near future. As Benjamin Wittes, a leading national security law expert, puts it: “The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.”