Kate Brannen at Foreign Policy says it’s become clear that it’s Bannon who’s running the show.

Even before he was given a formal seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee” this weekend by President Donald Trump, Bannon was calling the shots and doing so with little to no input from the National Security Council staff, according to an intelligence official who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.

That seems healthy. A week in, and people are afraid of retribution, and the guy calling the shots is a guy who built a new career on racism.

“He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” the official said. He described a work environment where there is little appetite for dissenting opinions, shockingly no paper trail of what’s being discussed and agreed upon at meetings, and no guidance or encouragement so far from above about how the National Security Council staff should be organized.

The intelligence official, who said he was willing to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt when it took office, is now deeply troubled by how things are being run.

They’re doing all these executive orders without the normal consultation and discussion.

Under previous administrations, if someone thought another person or directorate had a stake in the issue at hand or expertise in a subject area, he or she was free to share the papers as long as the recipient had proper clearance.

With that standard in mind, when some officials saw Trump’s draft executive orders, they felt they had broad impact and shared them more widely for staffing and comments.

That did not sit well with Bannon or his staff, according to the official. More stringent guidelines for handling and routing were then instituted, and the National Security Council staff was largely cut out of the process.

By the end of the week, they weren’t the only ones left in the dark. Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, was being briefed on the executive order, which called for immediately shutting the borders to nationals from seven largely Muslim countries and all refugees, while Trump was in the midst of signing the measure, the New York Times reported.

That’s not surprising, at this point, but it is terrifying.

The lack of a paper trail documenting the decision-making process is also troubling, the intelligence official said. For example, under previous administrations, after a principals or deputies meeting of the National Security Council, the discussion, the final agreement, and the recommendations would be written up in what’s called a “summary of conclusions” — or SOC in government-speak.

They’re important. They make it possible to go on discussing the decision.

During the first week of the Trump administration, there were no SOCs, the intelligence official said. In fact, according to him, there is surprisingly very little paper being generated, and whatever paper there is, the NSC staff is not privy to it. He sees this as a deterioration of transparency and accountability.

“It would worry me if written records of these meeting were eliminated, because they contribute to good governance,” Waxman said.

That’s putting it incredibly mildly. Transparency and accountability are crucial, and these dictators are preventing them.

It is equally important that NSC staff be the ones drafting the issue papers going into meetings, too, said Schulman. “The idea is to share with everyone a fair and balanced take on the issue, with the range of viewpoints captured in that document,” she said.

If those papers are now being generated by political staff, she added, it corrupts the whole process.

It could also contribute to Bannon’s centralization of power.

“He who has the pen has the authority to shape outcomes,” the intelligence official said.

Now Bannon’s role in the shadows is being formalized thanks to an executive order signed Saturday by Trump that formally gives Bannon a seat on the National Security Council’s principals committee. The same executive order removed from that group the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, and the secretary of energy. Their new diminished role is not unprecedented, but some still find it a troubling piece of this larger picture.

It’s not unlike a coup.

I don’t want to be governed by a Breitbart troll who has seized power in secret. I really don’t.

Meanwhile, Bannon’s new role is unprecedented. Under Obama, it wasn’t unheard of for his chief political advisors, John Podesta and David Axelrod, to attend NSC meetings, but they were never guaranteed a seat at the table. Under Bush, the line between national security and domestic political considerations was even clearer. Top aides have said they never saw Karl Rove or “anyone from his shop” in NSC meetings, and that’s because Bush told him explicitly not to attend.

The signal Bush “especially wanted to send to the military is that, ‘The decisions I’m making that involve life and death for the people in uniform will not be tainted by any political decisions,’” former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said last September.

That’s actually rather impressive. Well done Bush.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Bannon’s appointment to the council as a permanent member a “radical departure” from how the decision-making body was organized in the past, adding that he found the change “concerning.”

Inside and outside of government, there are also deep reservations about Bannon’s alignment with the far right and white nationalism, thanks to his previous leadership of Breitbart.

Well quite. He doesn’t belong there. None of this is ok.

Trump’s management style is known to be highly unstructured, if not chaotic. The Post reported in May that he was running his presidential campaign like he ran his business — “fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.”

“While this may have worked for his company, it is certainly not a way to run a country,” the official said.

No, it’s not. It’s a nightmare.

Is Trump planning to do an anti-LGB executive order? Spicer refuses to deny it.

Is Donald Trump getting ready to take executive action that would screw over his treasured LGBTQ constituency—the very citizens he promised to protect on the campaign trail? It was a charge that White House press secretary Sean Spicer couldn’t deny during Monday’s briefing, writes Towleroad.

Spicer responded to a question from Chris Johnson at the Washington Blade at today’s briefing.

Said Spicer:

“I’m not getting ahead of the executive orders that we may or may not issue. There’s a lot of executive orders, a lot of things the president has talked about and will continue to fulfill but we have nothing on that front now…”

LGBTQ Nation published a story early on Monday citing anonymous sources saying that an executive order was rumored to be in the works that would allow discrimination against LGBTQ Americans based on religious grounds. If true, that would be rich—since the text of Trump’s own refugee ban reads:

“The United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred […] or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.”

Wellll, Malignant Narcissists are allowed to contradict themselves that way, for the simple and elegant reason that they are never wrong about anything. Feel better now?

I'm told reliably there is a draft Executive order on LGBT issues including adoption. Details and timing unclear.

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) January 30, 2017

If there’s a bad thing to do, Trump will do it.

To make it all worse, there’s every reason to think Trump is psychologically, intellectually, and emotionally incapable of learning from failures or paying attention to criticism. Goldwater “Rule” or no Goldwater rule, it’s hard to deny that he’s a Malignant Narcissist. Malignant Narcissists don’t listen to no stinkin criticism.

Until recently, it was illegal for psychologists to assess public figures and talk to journalists about their findings. But this rule has now changed, and mental health experts are speaking out about Trump.

Ah no. It wasn’t illegal – how could it have been? No, it was a professional rule, and I gather that professionals considered it pretty binding, but that’s very far from “illegal.” At any rate the extreme menace of Trump has eroded the rule (and made it a menace itself).

In a bid to warn the public, psychologists are publishing their diagnoses of Trump. Most recently, John D. Gartner said Trump “is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

I read that story when it appeared, and was going to blog it, but Trump’s frantic activities got in the way.

He believes Trump shows signs of “malignant narcissism,” which is defined as a mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism in Campbells’ Psychiatric Dictionary.

Check check check check. He’s all of those and then some.

Just after the election, a group called Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism was created, which was joined by thousands of psychologists. They published a manifesto warning of Trump’s psychosis, citing the following as the signs to fear:

“Scapegoating and banishing groups of people who are seen as threats, including immigrants and religious minorities; degrading, ridiculing, and demeaning rivals and critics; fostering a cult of the Strong Man who appeals to fear and anger; promises to solve our problems if we just trust in him; reinvents history and has little concern for truth (and) sees no need for rational persuasion.”

The American Psychiatry Association has a nine-point checklist for narcissism – if someone displays just five of the traits, they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes.

All nine of them fit him like a very tight leotard. He tweets most of them daily.

“With Trump, he’s a disturbed person who protects himself by building up his ego and tearing down others,” an anonymous psychologist explained to the NY Daily News.

One woman who used to be one of Trump’s construction workers, Barbara Res, emailed the NY Daily News with a story from 1982 when she was working on one of his construction sites. The NY Times had just published an article about narcissism, which one of the team-members brought to work.

“Being the team who was charged with building Trump Tower, we all knew Donald Trump very well, especially myself. To a person, we all agreed that the characteristics outlined in the article fit Donald to a ‘T’. Now, 35 years later, professionals are saying what we knew back then. Only now he is so much worse.”

And now he’s president, and can make people suffer in airports, and launch the nukes.

This should be the part where a magic being comes in and saves the day. Sorry, there doesn’t seem to be one.

Shame on Theresa May.

(I’ve never liked that phrase – “shame on ___.” But I’m afraid it’s going to become indispensable in our new reality.)

She is refusing to tell Donald Trump to forget about that state visit. Well she damn well should tell him that.

US President Donald Trump’s planned state visit to the UK will go ahead no matter how many people sign a petition against it, Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday.

More than a million people have so far called for the visit to be cancelled.

The petition, if accepted by Parliament, will force MPs to debate the motion: “Prevent Donald Trump from making a State Visit to the United Kingdom.”

However, Theresa May insisted the visit would still go ahead, no matter how many people signed a petition against it.

It shouldn’t. I know it’s a very big deal to cancel a state visit, but what Trump is doing is a much bigger deal – which means that the fact that canceling is a big deal is all the more reason to cancel.

Remember the soothing murmurs before and even after the election that “checks and balances” would prevent Trump from getting away with authoritarian excesses? I do.

The Times points out the obvious fact that there don’t seem to be any.

By circumventing normal practices for formulating policies and their execution, the White House has created still-swirling confusion about whom the order targets and how it will be enforced. There is also ambiguity about the legality of the order, which the White House calls extreme vetting but which critics call a Muslim ban, and about how court challenges, already underway, will proceed.

For many abroad, the ban raised questions about how an American president could undertake such an action suddenly and unilaterally, seemingly unfettered by checks and balances. The order’s apparent breaches with usual protocol over how policy is made, and potentially with the law, are already creating major problems in its enforcement.

That’s putting it a good deal too politely. Trump is carrying on as if he had been handed absolute power on January 20th. Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about “usual protocol” because he thinks he’s the best person in the universe and that he can and should act accordingly.

Several federal courts have already prohibited deportations under the ban and have ordered that individuals detained at airports or at the border have access to lawyers. But there have been reports of customs and border officials refusing to comply.

This appears to set up a potential conflict between the branches of government — a worrying possibility, as the separation of powers is a cornerstone of American democracy. Should the judicial branch be blocked from performing its role as a check on the executive, it would lead to a constitutional crisis. It is unclear how Mr. Trump would respond to such a crisis or how it would resolve.

Again – carefully Timesesque wording for a starkly terrifying situation. To put it more bluntly: it seems to be entirely possible that Trump will respond to such a crisis the way he has responded all along: by imposing his will by force, by any means necessary. He’ll put us all in camps if that’s what it takes.

The president has broad powers to regulate and restrict immigration without congressional approval, though this is limited by certain constitutional protections that could apply.

Mr. Trump broke radically in this case with long-held norms of how executive power is exercised. Ordinarily, a president drafts policy changes by consulting, over a period of weeks or months, with federal agencies and other stakeholders in and outside the government.

Because even shitty presidents understand they are part of a government, not absolute rulers. But Trump is both too stupid and too conceited to understand that, and also to care if he did understand it. Malignant narcissists don’t understand things like that.

Those practices are meant to vet a policy for its legality and ability to be enforced, as well as for unforeseen consequences. The process also lets agencies begin planning how they will execute the policy and allows those affected to prepare.

The administration appears to have largely skipped that process, drafting this and other recent orders within a small circle of political advisers. Relevant agencies and the National Security Council were granted little or no review over the immigration order before it was signed.

Because he’s that stupid and incompetent, and he’s surrounded himself with enablers. The grownups have all left the building.

There is no law mandating such an internal review. But, by forgoing it, the administration circumvented an important internal check on executive power, while creating the impression that it is making critical national policy in slapdash fashion.

No, not “creating the impression” – actually doing it. It is obviously  making critical national policy in slapdash fashion.

But internal vetting is about more than practicalities and legalities; it is also meant to protect the core values and interests of the United States. More voices are emerging to challenge the order on those grounds, a concern that will probably remain even if the administration amends the order to pass legal muster.

That of course is the real horror. With one violent yank, he has pulled us into the moral world of Nazi Germany, and we don’t want to go there.

Google is observing Fred Korematsu Day today.

Korematsu tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but instead he was interned. Today is his birthday and recognized as Fred Korematsu Day in California, Hawaii, Virginia and Florida.

The illustration, known as the Google doodle, comes a day after Google established a $4 million fund for the American Civil Liberties Union, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, International Rescue Committee and UNHCR.

The ACLU has been one of the main organizations fighting Donald Trump‘s executive order to temporarily ban travel for immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen — and temporarily halt the entry of refugees into the United States.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose family fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, participated in protests of the travel ban this weekend, telling a Forbes reporter, “I’m here because I’m a refugee.”

Kellyanne Conway thinks journalists who diss Trump should be fired.

Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, on Sunday continued the administration’s attack against the media by claiming that network television reporters and commentators who “talked smack” about Trump before the election should be fired.

“Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go,” Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’m too polite to mention their names, but they know who they are, and they are all wondering who will be the first to go. The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go.”

She added that the networks should be “cleaning house,” firing “these people who said things that just weren’t true.”

Conway accused the media of focusing too much attention on her attempt last week to defend press secretary Sean Spicer flagrantly lying to reporters — by claiming he was stating “alternative facts.”

It turns out that we have it all wrong, the Trumpets are an incredibly inclusive buncha folks.

The White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Jews or anti-Semitism because “despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered,” administration spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN on Saturday.

Right down to the little children in Omaha who had to cut way back on candy for the duration.

Hicks provided a link to a Huffington Post UK story noting that while 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, 5 million others were also slaughtered during Adolf Hitler’s genocide, including “priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.”

Notice that if you divide those groups into 5 million you inevitably get a significantly smaller number than 6 million for any one group…but anyway…

Anti-Defamation League Director Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted that the “@WhiteHouse statement on #HolocaustMemorialDay, misses that it was six million Jews who perished, not just ‘innocent people'” and “Puzzling and troubling @WhiteHouse #HolocaustMemorialDay stmt has no mention of Jews. GOP and Dem. presidents have done so in the past.”

Asked about the White House explanation that the President didn’t want to exclude any of the other groups Nazis killed by specifically mentioning Jews, Greenblatt told CNN that the United Nations established International Holocaust Remembrance Day not only because of Holocaust denial but also because so many countries — Iran, Russia, Poland, and Hungary, for example — specifically refuse to acknowledge Hitler’s attempt to exterminate Jews, “opting instead to talk about generic suffering rather than recognizing this catastrophic incident for what is was: the intended genocide of the Jewish people.”

Downplaying or disregarding the degree to which Jews were targeted for elimination during the Holocaust is a common theme of nationalist movements like those seen in Russia and Eastern Europe, Greenblatt said.

And on Breitbart.

We have a far-right white nationalist racist Holocaust-denying government now.

Again, Trump blames the media for reporting what he’s doing, and tells the lie that the media are lying.

With thousands of protesters marching outside the White House and thronging the streets of Washington and other cities, Mr. Trump late Sunday defended his order. “To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting,” he said in a written statement. “This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe.”

Liar.

While Mr. Trump denied that his action was targeted against Muslims, just hours earlier he made clear on Twitter that he was concerned about Christian refugees. Part of his order gives preferential treatment to Christians who try to enter the United States from majority-Muslim countries.

In his Twitter post on Sunday morning, Mr. Trump deplored the killing of Christians in the Middle East without noting the killings of Muslims, who have been killed in vastly greater numbers in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

So he lied when he said it’s not a Muslim ban and that the media are “falsely reporting” it as such.

In a statement Sunday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said that agents would “continue to enforce all of President Trump’s executive orders,” and that “prohibited travel will remain prohibited.” But it also said that the department “will comply with judicial orders.”

The legal battles over the president’s order intensified as lawyers for those detained accused the government of failing to abide by the Saturday night rulings and said agents were refusing to allow them access to potential clients, in direct violation of those rulings.

On Saturday, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered government officials to “permit lawyers access to all legal permanent residents being detained at Dulles International Airport.” The ruling was one of at least four around the nation temporarily blocking aspects of Mr. Trump’s executive order.

“We continue to face Border Patrol noncompliance and chaos,” said Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

Lawyers gathered on Sunday morning at Dulles International Airport said that border agents had told lawyers that they would not be permitted to see anyone who was being held. Sharifa Abbasi, 32, one of the lawyers, said a customs agent had told her that “upper management” had instructed agents at Dulles not to provide any information or access to lawyers at the airport.

By Sunday afternoon, lawyers at Dulles were considering seeking a contempt order from Judge Brinkema against the border agency.

Go for it.

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.

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

Do they think it’s like a virus? Do they think people “catch” terrorism the way they might catch Ebola? Does it not cross their tiny festering minds that people in countries “compromised” by terrorism are very likely to want to get out for just that reason? That they could be loyal allies in the resistance to terrorism and theocratic authoritarianism? That Trump is acting more like a terrorist than like a rights-respecting human being?

Tiny festering minds don’t have much room left over for thinking, I guess.

What Trump found it worth saying on Twitter today, in the midst of the firestorm set off by his deranged ban on refugees:

Somebody with aptitude and conviction should buy the FAKE NEWS and failing @nytimes and either run it correctly or let it fold with dignity!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2017

One minute he’s throwing his toys out of the pram, the next minute he’s ruining the lives of thousands of people by signing a dictatorial order.

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.”