We highly doubt that, for all of the tumult over President Trump’s executive order restricting certain immigration to the United States, the order made any real difference to most of those who couldn’t wait for Donald Trump to take office or for those who had fervently prayed for a Hillary Clinton victory.
Trump supporters continue to support the immigration policies he advanced during the campaign and his detractors continue to condemn them. So, no real surprises here. Both groups knew what was coming.
So it would be a mistake to view the marchers and demonstrators as mobilizing merely to champion the cause of foreigners wishing to settle here – although that is certainly a part of it. What’s really driving events is an ongoing effort by those whose candidate lost in November to delegitimize the Trump presidency, which they see as representing the antithesis of the leftist “progressive” agenda – an agenda that includes “open borders” and unrestricted immigration as articles of faith.
As we have noted here before, one can see this as a common thread running through the transparently bad faith maneuvering on the part of disappointed liberals, which has included ballot recounts, attempts to compromise the Electoral College process, and seeking to have the House of Representatives decide who would be president – not because the Republican-dominated body would have denied Mr. Trump the presidency, but simply in order to make it seem that Mr. Trump’s election was somehow tainted.
And of course many of them seem to wish to prolong shelf life of the bizarre Obama fantasy that that there is no connection to speak of between terrorism and Islam. Indeed, Mr. Obama insisted that the two words never appear together in any administration document or statement.
So it is an utterly unacceptable notion to the anti-Trump forces that, in order to keep Islamic terrorists out of the United States, there needs to be a restriction on immigration from certain countries known to harbor terrorists and where Islam happens to be the official state religion.
This is not to deny that some travelers – estimates put the number at perhaps a hundred – were temporarily inconvenienced by some official miscues on the part of a one-week-old presidential administration. But this hardly justifies the impassioned rallies, marches, and demonstrations. We recall there was nothing approaching the current hysteria in response to the disastrous rollout by the Obama administration of the Affordable Care Act. President Obama’s own health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, described it as “terribly flawed.”
So let’s recognize the real dynamic in play. The question is whether President Trump be able to quickly implement his programs or whether those who oppose him will be successful in hampering his efforts from the street rather than through the traditional governmental process. We’ll know soon enough.