So now White House chief strategist and nativist Steve Bannon is a member of the National Security Council. Why is this a big deal? For one, from NPR national security editor Philip Ewing:

“On paper, these are big changes: Past administrations ran their National Security Councils with a Great Wall of China-separation between the political team at the White House and the nonpartisan specialists who help with decision-making. The explicit inclusion of Bannon means that Trump’s top adviser on messaging, strategy and other partisan issues means he could also be part of decisions about policy toward adversaries, military actions and other such decisions.

“What does it all mean, in practical terms? It’s too soon to say. Former national security council staffers say their day-to-day meetings and process were not governed by whatever formal instruction issued by their respective presidents. Political staffers from the White House have attended meetings in the past. The committees invite who they think they need to invite given the topics under discussion – something that will likely continue under [National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn.”

But it’s not really too soon to say. Bannon is a long admirer of anti-immigrant nationalism movements around the world who wants to overthrow the “globalist” status quo around the world. And CNN reported he was running point on the travel ban implementation.

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It’s not just that the ban was bigoted and anti-American, it was also incompetently drafted and implemented. Highly recommended reading: Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution fellow, on “Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas”:

I don’t use the word “malevolence” here lightly. As readers of my work know, I believe in strong counterterrorism powers. I defend non-criminal detention. I’ve got no problem with drone strikes. I’m positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies. I was much less offended than others were by the CIA’s interrogations in the years after September 11. I have defended military commissions.

Some of these policies were effective; some were not. Some worked out better than others. And I don’t mean to relitigate any of those questions here. My sole point is that all of these policies were conceptualized and designed and implemented by people who were earnestly trying to protect the country from very real threats. And the policies were, to a one, proximately related to important goals in the effort. While some of these policies proved tragically misguided and caused great harm to innocent people, none of them was designed or intended to be cruel to vulnerable, concededly innocent people. Even the CIA’s interrogation program, after all, was deployed against people the agency believed (mostly correctly) to be senior terrorists of the most dangerous sort and to garner information from them that would prevent attacks.

I actually cannot say that about Trump’s new executive order—and neither can anyone else.

[I]n the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

Wittes goes on to catalog the incompetence in the order. Short version: It’s a gift to the ACLU in the short term, though many people will be hurt in the meantime and diplomatic relations will be deeply damaged. But the longterm outlook is the most frightening prospect of all, particularly with Bannon’s new roll: Crazy and incompetent people are running the country.

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