With a federal appeals court in Washington having refused on Thursday to lift an injunction against President Trump’s controversial travel-ban executive order, the White House has come to a bit of a fork in the road: Should it continue to litigate or just throw the ban out and try to write a new one that has more chance of being upheld?
Friday at the White House after a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump responded to a question about his plans by declaring that he would take both forks.
We are going to keep our country safe. We are going to do whatever is necessary to keep our country safe. We had a decision which we think we’ll be very successful with—it shouldn’t have taken this much time, because safety is a primary reason, one of the reasons I’m standing here today, the security of our country, the voters felt I would give it the best security. We’ll be doing something very rapidly having to do with additional security for our country. You’ll be seeing that sometime next week. In addition we will continue to go through the court process, and I have no doubt we’ll win that particular case.
As far as I can translate Trump, he’s saying that he thinks he’ll be “very successful” eventually with the original travel ban but is also going to announce some other deal next week, which, knowing his administration, will definitely be a detailed policy proposal and not just a hastily written crap sandwich of a PR stunt that ends up doing nothing more than confusing everyone in government who has the unfortunate job of trying to put it into practice.
*Correction, Feb. 10: The headline of this post originally misstated Trump’s position as a vow to “appeal.” His administration in fact could accept the outcome of this week’s case—which involved an short-term injunction against Trump’s travel ban, not a full determination of its legality—but continue fighting for the ban when it receives its full review in district court.
