How a 'Chaos Candidate' Becomes a Disaster President

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.

But Trump's sunny disposition could not hide the folly of a presidential order that was written and signed without consultation with the departments of Defense, Justice or Homeland Security, the departments responsible for the order's enforcement.

Yet administration officials said they would not back down on the order, even as it was being tweaked on Sunday to exempt green card-holding permanent residents.

Yet a little more care might have avoided the Monday night drama that resembled a constitutional crisis. Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates that evening after she ordered Justice Department lawyers not to defend the immigration order. Her act "betrayed" the department, said a White House news release, by "refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect" American citizens.

Will Trump's policy make Americans safer? There's nothing inherently wrong with what Trump calls "extreme vetting," although he's not speaking factually when he claimed "we don't know anything about" refugee applicants now. In fact, he inherited a rigorous vetting process that usually takes about two years to complete.

But the biggest problem with Trump's program is not so much in what it is as in how it was implemented. The administration's callous disregard not only for the inconvenience but, in some cases, injustice only adds more fuel for the propaganda and recruitment machines of the Islamic State and other Islamist terrorists.

With Republicans firmly in charge of Congress and the White House, there's not much that Democrats can do to put a check on Trump's excesses, except perhaps make some eloquent speeches. So far, Trump's outspoken Republican critics are few. But give him time. Once labeled a "chaos candidate" by his rivals, he's turning into a disaster-prone president.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)