Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon tried to order Department of Homeland Security secretary John Kelly to not issue a waiver exempting green card holders from President Trump’s travel ban executive order, according to a new report in the Washington Post. Per two Trump administration officials who spoke with the Post’s Josh Rogin, Kelly ultimately rebuffed the attempt, telling Bannon that he only takes orders from the president. The president never weighed in, and Kelly went ahead and issued the waiver, which was made public on Sunday night. That waiver ended two full days of confusion and chaos around the question of whether or not permanent U.S. residents from the seven predominantly Muslim nations included in the ban would be allowed to reenter the country. The White House itself then confirmed that green card holders were exempt from the order on Tuesday.
According to Rogin’s sources, Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and then Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson also banded together during a 2 a.m. phone call among White House staff on Sunday to oppose the haphazard way the president’s executive order had been conceived and implemented by the White House’s growing Breitbart wing, Bannon and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. Then during a larger meeting later on Sunday, Trump reportedly decided to temporarily suspend the issuing of executive orders until a better process — one that included more input from more White House officials — could be implemented.
If Rogin’s reporting is accurate, it indicates that Bannon seems have lost an important early power struggle, though not for lack of trying. Last weekend, CNN reported that the DHS had finished a legal analysis of the travel ban order on Friday and concluded that it did not apply to green card holders, but that the White House, and more specifically Bannon and Miller, had overruled that conclusion. On Friday and Saturday, Trump administration officials ended up sending mixed signals as to whether or not permanent residents were to be allowed onto planes to the U.S., as well as whether or not they would face extra screening, or have to apply for a waiver somehow, to gain re-entry to the U.S. As a result, many of these travelers were stranded and detained, ultimately for no reason.
According to the Post report, it was on Saturday that Kelly decided to just issue the waiver exempting all green card holders from the ban, and that’s when Bannon — who has previously indicated that he would like to get rid of all legal immigration — attempted to intervene, apparently for the second time, by showing up at Kelly’s office and ordering him to not go through with the waiver. (The White House denies that Bannon showed up at Kelly’s office.) Rogin’s reporting also ties in with this week’s TIME cover story asserting that Bannon’s contributions to the tumult of the new administration’s first few weeks “has rattled the West Wing and perhaps even dismayed the President,” and that the controversy was leading to a slowing of the pace of the new administration’s agenda.
Though some in the White House have tried, there is virtually no way to spin the disastrous rollout of the travel ban as a success — unless confusion, mass protests, and inner-circle backstabbing was the desired outcome. Several reports have indicated that the travel ban order was hastily and incompetently written, barely reviewed, and implemented and communicated with next to no planning. So far, the blame seems have landed on the Trump administration’s Breitbart wing. And while there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of Bannon or Miller’s influence diminishing, there are at least some indications that other White House cabinet members are pushing to confront them.
Then again, it’s also important to realize that, as The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray points out, most of these unnamed Trump officials are leaking negative stories about Miller and Bannon in an attempt to limit their influence in the White House. Understanding that, the fact that they are being widely and specifically scapegoated for the travel ban fallout likely illustrates how powerful they have already become.
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