President Donald Trump’s initial public reaction to the weekend’s terror attack in London came via his Twitter feed. “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough,” tweeted the president, as the news came in that terrorists had crashed a van and stabbed several people in crowded areas of London. “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
The tweet prompted discussion of the president’s travel ban—shorthand used by both Trump himself and the media to describe two successive executive orders, the most recent of which limits travel into the United States from six Muslim-majority nations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The courts have so far successfully blocked the ban from being implemented, based on suits alleging the order is unconstitutionally biased against Muslims. A temporary restraining order and later an indefinite preliminary injunction were issued on the current order by U.S. district court in Maryland, and that injunction was upheld in federal appeals court last month. Just last week, the Trump Justice Department appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The ban, while halted, is set to expire on July 16.
The travel ban may be in legal limbo, but the work of protecting the country, presumably, continues. After all, the whole reason the ban itself was designed to be temporary was to give the new Trump administration time to develop an “extreme vetting” procedure that could be used to more strictly screen foreign travelers for ties to terrorist organizations or ideologies. Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican senator and ally of the president, said as much on Fox News Sunday this weekend.
“The president does certainly have the right to put in place extreme vetting,” said Blunt. “It has been four months since they said they needed four months to put that in place. I think they can do that without a travel ban and I hope they are.”
I asked the White House what has happened in the development of an extreme vetting system. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said “the State Department is the best place to touch base with.” Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to emailed questions about the state of a vetting system.
Corker for…Something?
The Washington Post reported on President Trump’s golf outing Sunday with two guests to his Northern Virginia country club: retired NFL star quarterback Peyton Manning and Tennessee senator Bob Corker. Manning, the Post notes, was in town for an award reception at Washington’s Ford’s Theater (which the president attended). He’s also a Republican and supporter of Trump’s.
But why Corker? It’s true there’s a Tennessee connection—Manning played college football in Knoxville, where he led the Volunteers to an SEC championship. But could Corker’s visit with the president suggest he could have a role in an administration that’s looking to shake itself up?
Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, was in the running for secretary of state before Trump tapped ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for the job. He’s been largely supportive of Trump in public, aside from Corker’s comment in May that the administration was in a “downward spiral” after it was reported Trump had disclosed previously classified intelligence to Russian officials. But Corker likely made up for the criticism with an enthusiastic assessment of the president’s recent foreign trip.
“I spoke with President Trump at length this morning and told him that I could not be more pleased with his first international trip,” Corker said in a May 28 statement. “The trip was executed to near perfection and it appears the president has made great progress on the broad range of objectives his team articulated to me when I met with senior White House and State Department officials during their preparations.”
Foreign policy remains an interest of Corker’s, and it’s possible that if and when Tillerson leaves the State Department, Corker could be lining himself up as the obvious successor. But could he instead be angling for a job inside the White House, such as chief of staff? As the former mayor of Chattanooga, Corker isn’t unfamiliar with working in an executive government office. And the Tennessee Republican has for the most part shown himself to be loyal and supportive of the president throughout the year.
Asked to comment on what Trump and Corker discussed on the golf course, Sean Spicer declined.
RIP SIG
The Strategic Initiatives Group no longer exists, reports the Daily Beast. “Critics inside and outside the White House had worried that the SIG—which reported to White House Chief Strategist [Steve] Bannon, Trump son-in-law and key adviser [Jared] Kushner, as well as White House chief of staff Reince Priebus—would compete with the National Security Council,” writes the Beast.
The demise of the SIG supposedly has to do with infighting between Bannon and Kushner, though the internal “think tank” of the White House, as the group was pitched, never really made sense within the West Wing’s organizational structure. Its purview was too wide—everything from domestic policy to national security to government IT—with too much overlap with existing White House offices and initiatives.
The group was never fully staffed, and had trouble filling jobs. One person hired for the group’s national security task force, Victoria Coates, was immediately pulled over to the National Security Council instead. And the SIG’s most prominent hire, Sebastian Gorka, was supposed to lead the group’s cybersecurity task force. Instead, Gorka has spent most of his White House tenure as a surrogate on cable TV news.
