More on Bannon’s elevation:

President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Saturday that removed the nation’s top military and intelligence advisers as regular attendees of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, the interagency forum that deals with policy issues affecting national security.

The executive measure established Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon as a regular attendee, whereas the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence will be allowed to participate only “where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.”

The two core experts are demoted while the loony neofascist amateur takes their place.

John McCain says it’s unprecedented. Not everything unprecedented is bad, but this? This is bad.

John Bellinger, an adjunct senior fellow in International and National Security Law at the Council on Foreign Relations and former legal adviser to the National Security Council, wrote on Saturday that the change is “unusual.”

“In the Bush administration, Karl Rove would not attend NSC meetings,” Bellinger said. “According to former Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, President Bush did not want to appear, especially to the military, to insert domestic politics into national security decision-making.”

And that’s Bush – hardly a standout in the field.

Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates told ABC on Sunday morning that sidelining the DNI and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was “a big mistake.”

“Adding people to the NSC never really bothers me,” Gates said, referring to Bannon’s new role on the committee. “My biggest concern is that, under law, there are only two statutory advisers to the National Security Council — the DNI, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

“Pushing them out,” Gates said, is “a big mistake. They both bring perspective, judgment, and experience to bear that every president — whether they like it or not — finds useful.”

But on the other hand Bannon brings

um

No, cancel that.

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reported before Trump was sworn in that Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Reince Priebus comprised an informal “shadow national security council” that “sits atop the Trump transition team’s executive committee and has the final say on national-security personnel appointments.”

Jared Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Priebus is Trump’s chief of staff.

“Bannon has been working on the long-term strategic vision that will shape the Trump administration’s overall foreign policy approach,” Rogin reported, citing transition officials. He “is committed to working on the buildup of the military and is also interested in connecting the Trump apparatus to leaders of populist movements around the world, especially in Europe.”

Oh dear god.

A new Axis is forming. I don’t see how that could go wrong at all, do you?

Breitbart’s role inside the Trump White House is growing: Sebastian Gorka, an editor for National Security Affairs at Breitbart who was paid by Trump’s campaign for policy consulting, is expected to join the National Security Council. Julia Hahn, a hardline immigration writer for Breitbart, will join the administration as a special assistant to the president.

The Breitbart administration.

On Saturday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Fox that he helped draft Trump’s “extreme vetting” executive order after Trump called him and asked how to do a “Muslim ban” “legally.” Officials told CNN that the order was a unilateral move.

Department of Homeland Security staff, the officials said, were only allowed to see the order barring refugees from the US after Trump signed it, and National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. The State Department and the DoD were also excluded from the process, NBC reported.

After seeing the order, the DHS interpreted it to mean that green card holders from the banned countries — who have already been subjected to intense vetting — would be allowed to reenter the US from trips abroad. But that interpretation was overruled by the White House, which later said that green card holders would be allowed in only on a “case-by-case” basis.

Steve Bannon has to check them out first.

“The policy team at the White House developed the executive order on refugees and visas,” CNN reported, “and largely avoided the traditional interagency process that would have allowed the Justice Department and homeland security agencies to provide operational guidance.”

As a result, the order was imprecise and open to interpretation — and legal challenges.

The order “looks like what an intern came up with over a lunch hour,” an immigration lawyer told Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “My take is that it is so poorly written that it’s hard to tell the impact.”

They’re doing their best to create a dictatorship. It looks as if they’re going to get away with it.

I think what Trump is doing with the ban order is a variation on the availability heuristic – on looking for your keys under the lamp post even though you dropped them 20 feet away, because the light is better under the lamp post. I think he’s thinking, stupidly, that if you’re just harsh enough, you will have Great Success in preventing terrorist incidents in your vicinity.

He’s also reasoning backward while dropping a slew of relevant details in the process. He’s reasoning from “people whose parents immigrated from Mooslim countries have blown people up or away in Paris and Brussels and London” to “therefore if we ban people from a few Mooslim countries, even though they’re not the relevant Mooslim countries, then we will be safe.” The holes in the argument are rather dramatically obvious. Just for a start, there are a lot of majority-Muslim countries, and funnily enough Trump fixed on ones from which shooters and bombers have not originated. He must be thinking of “Mooslim countries” as a kind of soup, such that doing something to a few spots in the soup will spread out to affect the whole soup.

But also, of course, the shooters and bombers are a tiny tiny minority of whatever demographic they come from. They’re a tiny minority of people whose parents came from Pakistan, and those whose parents came from Algeria, and ditto all the other countries on the list of Mooslim countries, with Trump’s chosen seven down on the bottom. Also? They’re already here. Most of the shooters and bombers have been second-generation – a ban on new arrivals can’t touch the second generation, and is in fact very likely to motivate many of them to become shooters themselves. It might motivate me if I were one.

Yet Trump keeps grunting, like an idiot, that he’s doing this to Make Us Safe. He seems to think that Will and Force and Determination and Grit are all that’s required to get good results. He also seems to think that brutality works – that severity is somehow accurately pegged to effectiveness, so that the more severe we are, the better the outcome will be.

And he has the power to put his incredibly sloppy thinking into effect.

Steve Bannon on the National Security Council.

I wish that were a joke, but it’s not.

Trump has given Bannon a regular seat at the NSC, while making other people part-timers.

President Donald Trump granted controversial adviser Steve Bannon a regular seat at meetings of the National Security Council on Saturday, in a presidential memorandum that brought the former Breitbart publisher into some of the most sensitive meetings at the highest levels of government.

The president named Bannon to the council in a reorganization of the NSC. He also said his chief-of-staff Reince Priebus would have a seat in the meetings.

Trump also said the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence, two of the most senior defense chiefs, will attend meetings only when discussions are related to their “responsibilities and expertise”. Barack Obama and George W Bush both gave the men in those roles regular seats on the council.

More frightening every day.

A judge has blocked part of Trump’s executive order.

A federal judge blocked part of President Trump’s executive order on immigration on Saturday evening, ordering that refugees and others trapped at airports across the United States should not be sent back to their home countries. But the judge stopped short of letting them into the country or issuing a broader ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s actions.

Lawyers who sued the government to block the White House order said the decision, which came after an emergency hearing in a New York City courtroom, could affect an estimated 100 to 200 people who were detained upon arrival at American airports in the wake of the order that Mr. Trump signed on Friday afternoon, a week into his presidency.

Judge Ann M. Donnelly of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, ruled just before 9 p.m. that implementing Mr. Trump’s order by sending the travelers home could cause them “irreparable harm.”

Dozens of people waited outside of the courthouse chanting, “Set them free!” as lawyers made their case. When the crowd learned that Judge Donnelly had ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, a rousing cheer went up in the crowd.

A big shout-out to the ACLU and to all the lawyers who rushed to JFK to help people.

While none of the detainees will be sent back immediately, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case expressed concern that all those at the airports would now be put in detention, pending a resolution of the case. Inviting the lawyers to return to court if the travelers were detained, Judge Donnelly said, “If someone is not being released, I guess I’ll just hear from you.”

They have visas. They did nothing wrong. How dare he.

I just want to pause for a moment to point out what a disgusting photo this is. If they’d tried to put in every slap in the face to humane people they could think of, this is what they would have come up with.

Malala speaks up:

Malala Yousafzai’s statement on President Trump’s latest executive order on refugees:

“I am heartbroken that today President Trump is closing the door on children, mothers and fathers fleeing violence and war. I am heartbroken that America is turning its back on a proud history of welcoming refugees and immigrants — the people who helped build your country, ready to work hard in exchange for a fair chance at a new life.

I am heartbroken that Syrian refugee children, who have suffered through six years of war by no fault of their own, are singled-out for discrimination.

I am heartbroken for girls like my friend Zaynab, who fled wars in three countries — Somalia, Yemen and Egypt — before she was even 17. Two years ago she received a visa to come to the United States. She learned English, graduated high school and is now in college studying to be a human rights lawyer.

Zaynab was separated from her little sister when she fled unrest in Egypt. Today her hope of being reunited with her precious sister dims.

In this time of uncertainty and unrest around the world, I ask President Trump not to turn his back on the world’s most defenseless children and families.”

Trump says his Nazi-style ban on refugees is working “nicely.” His stupidity is exceeded only by his callous indifference to the miseries of anyone who isn’t Donald Trump.

The fallout from President Trump’s temporary ban on refugees to the U.S. struck with full force Saturday, blocking some travelers from boarding their planes overseas, compelling others to turn around upon arrival in the U.S., and prompting customs agents at New York’s JFK Airport to detain at least a dozen people, including a former Iraqi translator for the U.S. military in Baghdad.

The growing chaos also sparked legal challenges, airport protests, condemnations from politicians and denunciations from advocacy groups.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Saturday tweeted an offer of support to those who had been stopped at the state’s airports: “I have directed Port Authority, @NYSDOS, & my Counsel’s Office to jointly explore all legal options to assist anyone detained at NY airports.”

It looks is if it’s getting to be civil disobedience time. People in the mid-nineteenth century civil disobeyed the Fugitive Slave Act, and we’re going to have to civil disobey this dictatorial ban on refugees.

Speaking to hundreds of demonstrators at JFK Airport, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., called the ban ineffective, discriminatory, “disgusting,” and said it “goes against every ounce of our traditions from George Washington onward.”

“We are here to say it should be stopped and be revoked,” he said.

…

In brief remarks while signing his latest executive orders Saturday, Trump maintained the order isn’t a “Muslim ban.”

“It’s working out very nicely. We’re going to have a strict ban, and we’re going to have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years,” he said.

We already do have “extreme vetting.”

https://youtu.be/-SAdmW3-unM

The Times reports on the horrors Trump has unleashed.

President Trump’s executive order on immigration quickly reverberated through the United States and across the globe on Saturday, slamming the border shut for an Iranian scientist headed to a lab in Boston, an Iraqi who had worked as an interpreter for the United States Army, and a Syrian refugee family headed to a new life in Ohio, among countless others.

Around the nation, security officers at major international gateways had new rules to follow. Humanitarian organizations scrambled to cancel long-planned programs, delivering the bad news to families who were about to travel. Refugees who were airborne on flights when the order was signed were detained at airports.

Reports rapidly surfaced Saturday morning of students attending American universities who were blocked from getting back into the United States from visits abroad. One student said in a Twitter post that he would be unable to study at Yale. Another who attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was refused permission to board a plane. Stanford University was reportedly working to help a Sudanese student return to California.

Human rights groups reported that legal permanent residents of the United States who hold green cards were being stopped in foreign airports as they sought to return from funerals, vacations or study abroad — a clear indication that Mr. Trump’s directive is being applied broadly.

It’s just disgusting and horrific and intolerable.

Mr. Trump’s order, enacted with the stroke of a pen on Friday afternoon, suspended entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The Department of Homeland Security said that the executive order barred green card holders from those countries from re-entering the United States.

…

The White House said the restrictions would protect “the United States from foreign nationals entering from countries compromised by terrorism” and ensure “a more rigorous vetting process.” But critics condemned Mr. Trump over the immediate collateral damage imposed on people who, by all accounts, had no sinister intentions in trying to come to the United States.

But we don’t need to be protected from foreign nationals entering from countries compromised by terrorism; those people are trying to get away from the terrorism.

An official message to all American diplomatic posts around the world provided instructions about how to treat people from the countries affected: “Effective immediately, halt interviewing and cease issuance and printing” of visas to the United States.

Confusion turned to panic at airports around the world, as travelers found themselves unable to board flights bound for the United States. In Dubai and Istanbul, airport and immigration officials turned passengers away at boarding gates and, in at least one case, ejected a family from a flight they had boarded.

Seyed Soheil Saeedi Saravi, a leading young scientist in Iran, had been scheduled to travel in the coming days to Boston, where he had been awarded a fellowship to study cardiovascular medicine at Harvard, according to Thomas Michel, the professor who was to supervise the research fellowship.

Well we can’t have that. Maybe he’s just planning to put little bombs in everyone’s heart.

Danielle Drake, a community relations manager at US Together, a refugee resettlement agency, told the newspaper that Mr. Trump’s ban reminded her of when the United States turned away Jewish refugees during World War II. “All those times that people said, ‘Never again,’ well, we’re doing it again,” she said.

On Twitter, Daniel W. Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, posted an angry message for Mr. Trump after the executive order stopped the arrival of a Syrian family his synagogue had sponsored.

I saw him on Rachel Maddow’s show last night. He was wrathfully eloquent.

Iranian green card holders who live in the United States were blindsided by the decree while on vacation in Iran, finding themselves in a legal limbo and unsure whether they would be able to return to America.

“How do I get back home now?” said Daria Zeynalia, a green card holder who was visiting family in Iran. He had rented a house and leased a car, and would be eligible for citizenship in November. “What about my job? If I can’t go back soon, I’ll lose everything.”

Shadi Heidarifar, a philosophy student recently admitted to New York University, said in a message on Twitter that she had spent three years applying to universities in the United States.

“I had to work to save money, gather documents. The application fees were so expensive that a whole family could live for a month” on them, Ms. Heidarifar wrote. When she was accepted recently, she was elated. “But now my entire future is destroyed in one second.”

It’s disgusting. Trump has pulled us into the abyss with him.

The fascists at work:

Vice President Pence and Defense Secretary James Mattis stood directly behind their boss Friday, one man on each side, as President Trump announced an order that will ban half the world’s Shiite Muslims from entering the country for months.

“I’m establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States,” Trump said from his podium at the Pentagon. “We don’t want ’em here.”

Malevolent imbecile. Immigrants are already vetted. Nobody’s flinging the doors open to Islamist terrorists.

Pence nodded along to the words. It was just over a year earlier when he had called Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States “offensive and unconstitutional.” That was before Trump picked him as his running mate and won the election.

Self-serving piece of shit.

Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.

— Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) December 8, 2015

Right then, Pence; wrong now. Self-serving piece of shit now.

Trump sat down after his speech, signed the executive order and handed it to Mattis — a retired general who six months earlier had said the mere suggestion of a ban on Muslims caused “great damage” to world order.

Now, Mattis was defense secretary. He took the order and grinned while Pence started clapping.

Like other Republicans, the two men’s condemnations of Trump’s words had evaporated as he drew closer to power — and as his original call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” morphed into a nearly 3,000-word orderthat does not mention Islam but temporarily bar visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Cowardly self-serving scum.

After winning contest after contest in the spring primaries and turning his sights on the general election, Trump blasted Democrat Hillary Clinton for border policies that would “let the Muslims flow in.”

A few months later, a taciturn retired general who had overseen all U.S. military operations in the Middle East felt compelled to speak out against Trump.

The call for a Muslim ban was causing American allies to think “we have lost faith in reason,” Mattis told Politico last July.

“They think we’ve completely lost it,” he said. “It’s sending shock waves through this international system.”

He and Pence were joined in displeasure by Republicans across the spectrum. By former vice president Richard B. Cheney, who said banning a religion “goes against everything we stand for,” and who echoes language by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and many others.

But that’s all over now.

Jon Finer in Foreign Policy on how Trump is already disabling the State Department.

It’s no surprise that political appointees are asked to leave, he says.

But what is happening these days at the State Department — where a slew of senior career diplomats and management professionals have been given the non-choice between resigning effective Friday and being summarily relieved of their duties and where several others have retired voluntarily — is different and could be damaging. These are not, for the most part, people who have any role in implementing signature Obama administration policies on which the new team has signaled a different direction, like the Iran nuclear deal, fighting climate change, addressing women’s issues globally, or managing the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Rather, many of the officials set to depart in the coming days are responsible for bread-and-butter diplomatic and bureaucratic work that benefits all Americans and should be beyond the reach of politics. They oversaw the production of 19 million U.S. passports last year, the second highest annual total in American history. They helped return some 300 children abducted abroad to their rightful American parents. They are responsible for arranging visas for foreign nationals who come to the United States to do business or spend tourism dollars. They oversee security for more than 275 diplomatic posts overseas. They executed Obama’s decision to close Russian diplomatic facilities in response to interference in our election. They make good on our commitment to transparency by processing an unprecedented volume of document requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And they arrange for the evacuation of American citizens amid, for example, medical emergencies or burgeoning foreign crises.

And they’re being thrown out before anyone is lined up to replace them – which is not how things are normally done.

Meanwhile, on the policy side, the career officer serving as acting undersecretary of state for arms control and international security — the department’s most senior official dealing with, among other things, nuclear nonproliferation, chemical weapons, and the monitoring of arms control treaties — was en route to meetings in Europe when he was directed to return home to resign by Friday. The assistant secretary for conflict stabilization operations received a similar directive.

If these vacancies seem unsettling, you’ll need to get used to it. Between the extensive vetting required of senior appointees and a constipated Senate confirmation process, it will almost certainly be many months before these top positions get filled, leaving a vacuum that will impair the department’s ability to manage U.S. foreign relations, operate overseas, and serve the interests of the many millions of Americans who live or travel abroad.

Terrifying, isn’t it.

Intentional or otherwise, the message that the Trump administration is sending through these early personnel moves is not just that the new team is still getting its act together or wants a break from the past, both of which are understandable, but something potentially more pernicious. Career officials are concerned that it reflects a fundamental disregard for the essential role of diplomacy among our foreign-policy tools, by an administration that has shown an early fetish for all things economic and military. More troubling would be if the administration is subjecting the State Department to a subtler version of the freeze imposed on agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, intending to hamstring an institution whose rank and file are not fully trusted.

My guess? It’s that – the intentional hamstringing.

I despair.

Funny thing: Trump’s hot new immigration ban is illegal. It’s kind of odd that no one managed to tell him that before he announced it.

The Times explains how it’s against the law:

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that purports to bar for at least 90 days almost all permanent immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria and Iraq, and asserts the power to extend the ban indefinitely.

But the order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin.

That decision came after a long and shameful history in this country of barring immigrants based on where they came from. Starting in the late 19th century, laws excluded all Chinese, almost all Japanese, then all Asians in the so-called Asiatic Barred Zone. Finally, in 1924, Congress created a comprehensive “national-origins system,” skewing immigration quotas to benefit Western Europeans and to exclude most Eastern Europeans, almost all Asians, and Africans.

Mr. Trump appears to want to reinstate a new type of Asiatic Barred Zone by executive order, but there is just one problem: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin, replacing the old prejudicial system and giving each country an equal shot at the quotas. In signing the new law, President Lyndon B. Johnson said that “the harsh injustice” of the national-origins quota system had been “abolished.”

I guess laws are just for the little people? Trump doesn’t have to obey them if he doesn’t feel like it? And twenty billion people celebrated his inauguration?

Trump’s way of observing Holocaust Remembrance Day:

President Trump on Friday closed the nation’s borders to refugees from around the world, ordering that families fleeing the slaughter in Syria be indefinitely blocked from entering the United States, and temporarily suspending immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries.

In an executive order that he said was part of an extreme vetting plan to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists,” Mr. Trump also established a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations: He ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day. Nice timing.

The executive order suspends the entry of refugees into the United States for 120 days and directs officials to determine additional screening ”to ensure that those approved for refugee admission do not pose a threat to the security and welfare of the United States.”

The order also stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and bars entry into the United States for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries linked to concerns about terrorism. Those countries are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

…

Announcing his “extreme vetting” plan, the president invoked the specter of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of the 19 hijackers on the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pa., were from Saudi Arabia. The rest were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon. None of those countries are on Mr. Trump’s visa ban list.

Oh well but Trump has business interests in Saudi Arabia, so you see how he couldn’t possibly include them.

The president signed the executive order shortly after issuing a statement noting that Friday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an irony that many of his critics highlighted on Twitter. The statement did not mention Jews, although it cited the “depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.”

Trump, keen to inflict some depravity and horror on innocent people himself, has ensured that refugees who were on the way here when he issued his order are now being detained at airports, as if they were criminals.

President Trump’s executive order closing the nation’s borders to refugees was put into immediate effect on Friday night. Refugees who were airborne on flights on the way to the United States when the order was signed were stopped and detained at airports.

The detentions prompted legal challenges as lawyers representing two Iraqis held at Kennedy Airport filed a writ of habeas corpus early Saturday in the Eastern District of New York seeking to have their clients released. At the same time, they filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry.

Mr. Trump’s order, which suspends entry for all refugees for 120 days, created a legal limbo for people on their way to the United States and panic for families who were awaiting their arrival.

He likes it that way. He likes to inflict depravity and horror.

It was unclear how many refugees and immigrants were being held nationwide in the aftermath of the executive order. The complaints were filed by a prominent group including the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center, the National Immigration Law Center, Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and the firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.

The lawyers said that one of the Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq for 10 years. The other, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the United States to join his wife, who had worked for an American contractor, and young son, the lawyers said. They said both men had been detained at the airport on Friday night after arriving on separate flights.

Simply because brain-dead Donald Trump waved his tiny hand and said it shall be so.

The lawyers said they had not been allowed to meet with their clients, and there were tense moments as they tried to reach them.

“Who is the person we need to talk to?” asked one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, a supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

“Mr. President,” said a Customs and Border Protection agent, who declined to identify himself. “Call Mr. Trump.”

The executive order, which Mr. Trump said was part of an extreme vetting plan to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists,” also established a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations: He ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.

Unconstitutional, but whatever.

“We’ve never had an issue once one of our clients was at a port of entry in the United States,” Mr. Doss said. “To see people being detained indefinitely in the country that’s supposed to welcome them is a total shock.”

“These are people with valid visas and legitimate refugee claims who have already been determined by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to be admissible and to be allowed to enter the U.S. and now are being unlawfully detained,” Mr. Doss said.

It’s shameful. Shameful. We’re a pariah state now, and rightly so.

One of the people being held had worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq for 10 years. He had all the right papers and permissions, but they’re holding him anyway – and planning to send him back to Iraq. He came here from Stockholm.

According to the filing, Mr. Darweesh was granted a special immigrant visa on Jan. 20, the same day Mr. Trump was sworn in as president. Mr. Darweesh worked with the United States in Iraq in a variety of jobs — as an interpreter, engineer and contractor — over the course of roughly a decade.

Mr. Darweesh worked as an interpreter for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul starting shortly after the invasion of Iraq on April 1, 2003. The filing said he had been directly targeted twice for working with the United States military.

A husband and father of three, he arrived at Kennedy Airport on Friday evening with his family. Mr. Darweesh’s wife and children made it through passport control and customs, but agents of Customs and Border Protection stopped and detained him.

Brandon Friedman, who worked with Mr. Darweesh as an infantry lieutenant with the 101st Airborne, praised Mr. Darweesh’s work. “This is a guy that this country owes a debt of gratitude to,” Mr. Friedman said. “There are not many Americans who have done as much for this country as he has. He’s put himself on the line. He’s put his family on the line to help U.S. soldiers in combat, and it is astonishing to me that this country would suddenly not allow people like that in.”

There is no end to the evil of Trump. He will ratchet it up every day.

No.

Yesterday Trump outdid himself. First he put his name to a bombastic but empty statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that made no mention of Jews or Roma or leftists or lesbians and gays or disabled people – and then later in the day he slammed the door on refugees.

President Trump on Friday closed the nation’s borders to refugees from around the world, ordering that families fleeing the slaughter in Syria be indefinitely blocked from entering the United States, and temporarily suspending immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries.

Also yesterday, a new Twitter account appeared: St Louis Manifest. The St Louis was a ship – this ship:

On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba. On the voyage were 937 passengers. Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. Most were German citizens, some were from eastern Europe, and a few were officially “stateless.”

Cuba turned the ship away, and so did the US.

Following the US government’s refusal to permit the passengers to disembark, the St. Louis sailed back to Europe on June 6, 1939. The passengers did not return to Germany, however. Jewish organizations (particularly the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) negotiated with four European governments to secure entry visas for the passengers: Great Britain took 288 passengers; the Netherlands admitted 181 passengers, Belgium took in 214 passengers; and 224 passengers found at least temporary refuge in France. Of the 288 passengers admitted by Great Britain, all survived World War II save one, who was killed during an air raid in 1940. Of the 620 passengers who returned to continent, 87 (14%) managed to emigrate before the German invasion of Western Europe in May 1940. 532 St. Louis passengers were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. Just over half, 278 survived the Holocaust. 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France.

From St Louis Manifest:

My name is Manfred Fink. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Bergen-Belsen pic.twitter.com/2LFnB5yp3n

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Horst-Martin Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Auschwitz pic.twitter.com/Xh1oZCtJak

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Ruthild Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Theresienstadt pic.twitter.com/pxYclNerap

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Margot Hirsch. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Auschwitz pic.twitter.com/uwMRFqxOya

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Bertha Ellen Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Auschwitz pic.twitter.com/PyMnWXdpiW

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Adolf Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Golleschau pic.twitter.com/IrS9uY6kJ5

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Ilse Karliner. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Auschwitz pic.twitter.com/qkD7dP4pbt

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

My name is Josef Köppel. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Auschwitz pic.twitter.com/qREiM2XwnN

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

There are, of course, many many more.

Chris Cillizza at the Post wonders how long it will take for Trump to lose it over all these leaks that show what a chaotic childish fool he is.

I’ve never seen so much leaking so quickly — and with such disdain for the president — as I have in the first six days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Two recent examples:

1. This from the New York Times today on Trump’s impulsiveness:

Mr. Trump’s advisers say that his frenzied if admittedly impulsive approach appeals to voters because it shows that he is a man of action. Those complaining about his fixation with fictional voter fraud or crowd counts at his inauguration, in their view, are simply seeking ways to undercut his legitimacy.

Yet some of his own advisers also privately worry about his penchant for picking unnecessary fights and drifting off message. They talk about taking away his telephone or canceling his Twitter account, only to be dismissed by a president intent on keeping his own outlets to the world.

Intent on keeping his phone and his Twitter, and too stupid to grasp the need to grow up now.

2. This from WaPo on Trump’s inauguration crowd estimates:

Trump’s advisers suggested that he could push back in a simple tweet. Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a Trump confidant and the chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, offered to deliver a statement addressing the crowd size.

But Trump was adamant, aides said. Over the objections of his aides and advisers — who urged him to focus on policy and the broader goals of his presidency — the new president issued a decree: He wanted a fiery public response, and he wanted it to come from his press secretary.

Time and again, the image of Trump pushed by his “aides” is one of a clueless child — someone who acts on impulse, disregarding the better advice of people who know better. We know he needs to be managed or else he will say and do stupid things, the message seems to be. We’re working on it.

Yes, exactly – but then didn’t they already know that? Why are they working for him if they’re worried about the fact that he’s a clueless child? It’s not as if he concealed it until now.

Trump has shown that his tendency to obsessively consume media — especially cable television — is unchanged in the six days since he has become president. He appears to be making policy decisions via things he watches or reads. (Remember Trump’s famous/infamous statement that he got his military information and advice “mostly from the shows.”)

At odds with all of this, however, is the fact that Trump is both deeply proud and hugely image-conscious. Having to read and watch allegedly loyal “aides” casting him as a sort of feckless child constantly in need of guidance wouldn’t seem to be the sort of thing that would sit well with him.

Oh I wouldn’t call him “deeply proud.” That sounds too grown-up. He’s deeply conceited and prickly. That’s sort of the same thing, but less flattering.

So anyway, Cillizza thinks he’ll blow soon. Yep, that seems likely.

It’s taken me all day to catch up with the story about Trump going whining to the Park Service demanding new photos that showed 10 billion people on the Mall for his inauguration.

On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.

In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.

Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.

He’s that pathetic and ridiculous and vain and childish. And he has the nuclear codes.

Word rapidly spread through the agency and Washington. The individuals who informed The Washington Post about the call did so on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the conversation.

Yeah…it’s “sensitive” because it demonstrates how pathetic and ridiculous and vain and childish he is.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the call simply demonstrated that Trump’s management style is to be “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done,” Sanders said. “That’s one of the reasons that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”

No actually it’s because Comey sent that letter to Congress just before the election. Taking action isn’t an inherent good; it has to be the right action. Action in the form of badgering government officials to produce non-existent evidence of adoring crowds is not the right action, to put it mildly.

Reynolds was taken aback by Trump’s request, but he did secure some additional aerial photographs and forwarded them to the White House through normal channels in the Interior Department, the people who notified The Post said. The photos, however, did not prove Trump’s contention that the crowd size was upward of 1 million.

That’s because Reynold’s ignored his clear duty to fake them.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued to press the argument that the media has given a misleading account of the crowds that attended his inauguration.

“I had a massive amount of people here,” the president told ABC News anchor David Muir in an interview Wednesday. “They were showing pictures that were very unflattering, as unflattering — from certain angles — that were taken early and lots of other things.”

As he guided Muir through the West Wing, Trump paused at a photo on the wall, taken from behind him as he delivered his inaugural address: “Here’s a picture of the event. Here’s a picture of the crowd. Now, the audience was the biggest ever, but this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.”

He blathered at Hannity on Fox about it yesterday, too, saying the photograph was from the wrong end, from the back, and if they’d taken it from where he was, why, it would have looked entirely different. Yes, it would, but that’s because of how human eyesight works, not because there were actually more people provided you looked from the Congress end of the Mall.

And he has the nuclear codes.

Trump says more bad shit.

President Donald Trump said in a new interview Friday that persecuted Christians will be given priority over other refugees seeking to enter the United States, saying they have been “horribly treated.”

Speaking with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Trump said that it had been “impossible, or at least very tough” for Syrian Christians to enter the United States.

“If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness — but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought  it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.”

Trump did not name a reason or offer any evidence about why the agencies that vet refugees, including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, would have prioritized Muslim refugees over Christians.

Don’t be silly: it’s because they’re all Sekrit Mooslims.

Also on Friday, Trump signed an executive order freezing refugee applications from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa, including Syria. It’s unclear how his pledge to help persecuted Christians from those countries will accord with that plan.

The United States admitted a record number of 38,901 Muslim refugees in 2016, according to a study conducted by Pew. But nearly the same number of Christians, 37,521 were also admitted.

What are you gonna trust, Pew or Trump’s imagination?

The theocrats marching to demand a restoration of forced pregnancy got a boost from the Trumpists today.

Abortion opponents gathered on Friday in Washington for their annual march, which has taken place every year since 1974 to protest the Supreme Court’s 44-year-old Roe v. Wade decision from 1973.

■ Vice President Mike Pence, the highest-ranking official to ever speak in person at the march, told the crowd that “life is winning.”

■ Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, also addressed the crowd.

■ The march drew thousands of activists.

They want to make sure women go back to being victims of their own bodies.

In previous years, no president or vice president has ever addressed the march in person. This year, the Trump administration will be out in full force with the appearances of Mr. Pence and Ms. Conway.

President Trump, in one of his first official acts, signed an order prohibiting foreign aid to health providers abroad who discuss abortion as a family-planning option. And in a break with previous Republican presidents, he has embraced the idea of a litmus test for his Supreme Court nominees and pledged explicitly to name someone who opposes abortion. He said he would announce his choice on Thursday to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last February.

Handmaid’s Tale, here we come.