Yesterday, a judge in Hawaii issued a Temporary Restraining Order against Donald Trump's second travel ban. Last night, in Nashville, Trump fulminated against the judge's decision to a chorus of boos. If you read the decision, the judge's language is quite curt:
The Government appropriately cautions that, in determining purpose, courts should not look into the ‘veiled psyche’ and ‘secret motives’ of government decision-makers and may not undertake a ‘judicial psychoanalysis of a drafter’s heart of hearts’.
The Government need not fear. The remarkable facts at issue here require no such impermissible inquiry.
For instance, there is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release: ‘Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’
Nor is there anything ‘secret’ about the Executive’s motive specific to the issuance of the Executive Order:
Rudolph Giuliani explained on television how the Executive Order came to be. He said: “When [Mr. Trump] first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.’”
Trump assumes that the courts will forget about what he has said as quickly as he does. And he assumes that no one will see through the true intent of his actions. But judges aren't as stupid as he claims they are:
When signing the first Executive Order [No. 13,769], President Trump read the title, looked up, and said: ‘We all know what that means.’ President Trump said he was ‘establishing a new vetting measure to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America’, and that: ‘We don’t want them here.’
These plainly-worded statements, made in the months leading up to and contemporaneous with the signing of the Executive Order, and, in many cases, made by the Executive himself, betray the Executive Order’s stated secular purpose.
Any reasonable, objective observer would conclude, as does the Court for purposes of the instant Motion for TRO, that the stated secular purpose of the Executive Order is, at the very least, ‘secondary to a religious objective’ of temporarily suspending the entry of Muslims.
The judge sees through the Donald. He is just as blunt in dismissing Trump's Executive order as Trump is when dismissing his opponents. What goes around comes around.
