Trump’s Travel Ban: The Point is the Ban, Not Safety

So Trump has his travel ban – a constrained version of it, to be further reviewed by the Supreme Court in the fall – but he has a version of it, kicking in as of last night.

Which has got me wondering…  He proposed the first version of his ban on January 27, 154 days ago.  That got slapped down and he came back with version 2 on March 6, 116 days ago.

Both editions of the order demanded a 90-day ban, during which  “the federal government undertook a review of the visa-granting process to figure out which countries didn’t provide enough information about people seeking to come to the US.”  So the argument was that the danger to Americans was so dire that we had to resort to something extreme like a travel ban to work on enhancing our safety.  (Absurd and hyperbolic, I know, but that’s what they claimed to believe.)

But the thing I’m wondering is, if the danger was really that grave, shouldn’t Trump and his people have been working night and day on that visa-granting review, even if it was a little harder because the ban itself was on hold?  What the heck have they been doing?  It’s been well over 90 days since even the second version was proposed.  It this was about safety, they would have got busy and finished the review by now.

No, this is not about safety at all.  It never was.