What do a Muslim living in Chad and a roll of steel wire made in Canada have in common? They are both dire threats to the security of the United States, according to President Donald Trump, and have to be kept out of the country.
Now, no one in Canada – or Mexico and the European Union, whose steel and aluminum exports have also been hit with Mr. Trump’s tariffs – believes for one second that metal exports from U.S. allies are a threat to American security.
There are very few people in the U.S. who believe it, too. Even Republicans see it for the game it is; some are now trying to strip the President of the power to impose tariffs on so flimsy a pretext. Mr. Trump himself said that he imposed the tariffs on Canada as retaliation for our high tariffs on imported dairy products, a contradiction of his official position.
But the President can’t just slap tariffs on goods willy-nilly, or just because he got elected on a promise to tear up perfectly good free-trade deals that he demonized as the cause of all his voters’ economic ills.
So he reached into the presidential toolbox and found a loophole created during the Cold War, and which gave him a convenient way to live up to his campaign promises.
Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 allows the President to impose tariffs on goods that threaten “national security.” But it doesn’t define the term, leaving it to Mr. Trump to point a trembling finger at a roll of steel wire sitting in a Canadian warehouse waiting to be shipped to an American manufacturer, where it might become involved in the production of competitively priced goods, the creation of steady jobs and other subversive acts.
It’s so clearly a ploy. No reasonable person buys the President’s claim that steel and aluminum produced in Canada, of all places, are a threat to any American’s security, unless you’re perhaps referring to Mr. Trump’s job security.
Which makes it all the more troubling that the U.S. Supreme Court was not able to see through Mr. Trump’s equally naked political motivation for banning Muslims from entering the U.S. based on alleged security grounds.
For all the harsh words he spoke about free trade, and about other countries stealing American jobs, Mr. Trump’s toughest language during the election campaign was reserved for Muslims.
He called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He commented in a speech about shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, and mused about setting up a registry of Muslims in the U.S., as odious an idea as any presidential candidate has ever had.
As he became a serious contender, and then as President, he was obliged to water down his rhetoric so that he did not appear to be violating the principle of religious neutrality that is supposed to guide the American government. The “ban” became “extreme vetting” and was restricted to a list of countries with large Muslim populations, plus one or two rogue states thrown in for cover, North Korea included.
But the motivation never changed. Lower-court judges who overturned the President’s early efforts to restrict travel from Muslim countries saw through his national-security pretext. They read his speeches and looked at his Twitter account, and reversed his orders on the grounds he was targeting people based on their religion.
By a 5-4 vote, however, the Supreme Court said the President – in spite of his acknowledged animus toward Muslims – has broad latitude to restrict the entry of foreign nationals when he believes letting them in “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
It didn’t matter to the court that a person in Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen might have family in the U.S. and need to see them. Or that the President has singled out a religion for discriminatory treatment. Or that there is no evidence that banning entry to people from six Muslim-dominated countries will make America more secure.
What appears to matter to a conservative Supreme Court is expanding the power of the President to invoke national security to ban and bar, even when it is being done to feed the suspicions and anxieties of his political base. Even when it violates a founding principle of the United States. And even when any reasonable person can see through it.
“SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS TRUMP TRAVEL BAN. Wow!” Mr. Trump tweeted after the court’s ruling came out. Not even he could quite believe it.