ArcaMax

President Donald Trump has done an unexpected favor to former President Barack Obama's legacy. The bumpy rollout of Trump's travel ban makes the botched rollout of Obama's Affordable Care Act look smooth as silk.

Putting aside for a moment the critical question of whether the ban will make Americans safer (spoiler alert: probably not), the too-hastily written order sparked global confusion over how it was to be implemented. As critics in both parties have said, Trump's order for "extreme vetting" needed a lot more vetting, too.

As a result, the new president's signing of the executive order stranded travelers around the world, led to protests at airports across the country, touched off chaotic scenes across the immigration and national security bureaucracy.

Trump's executive order, unveiled last Friday at the end of his first full week in office, barred Syrian refugees from entering the United States, suspended all refugee admissions for 120 days and blocked citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Among the horror stories that resulted, Department of Homeland Security officials said that at least 100 people had been prevented from entering this country and many more had been stopped from boarding planes to this country. Based on the number of visas issued to the seven countries by the State Department, Trump's travel ban affects about 90,000 people.

For example, before federal judges issued stays of the order, detainees at Dulles International Airport near Washington, DC. included an Iranian couple in their 80s, according to news reports. Both had green cards confirming their status as legal permanent residents of this country. One was legally blind, and the other had recently had a stroke.

As volunteer lawyers and translators rushed to airports around the country, two Yemeni men at Dulles reportedly were coerced into signing away their green cards and were put on a plane back to Ethiopia, according to a lawsuit filed on their behalf.

They also included Iraqi immigrant Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who risked his life by working as an interpreter for the Army's 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul. He was held overnight at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport until Rep. Nadia Velazquez (R., N.Y.) demanded to see him on Saturday afternoon.

Another Iraqi, Fuad Sharef Suleman, wasn't as fortunate. He and his wife and their three children were in transit to the United States when they were prevented from boarding a plane in Cairo. Instead they were sent back to Erbil in Iraq's Kurdistan region, they told reporters. "Donald Trump destroyed my life," he told NBC News. "My family's life."

President Trump had a different view. The order to bar refugees and travelers is "working out very nicely," he told reporters. With his smiling face juxtaposed on TV news channels with scenes of airport chaos, the president sounded like "Baghdad Bob," the nickname given to Saddam Hussein's sunny spokesman during the Iraq war.

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