Not only is Trump’s Muslim ban generating protests and chaos across the country and around the world, it also has a negative impact on national security.

Though cast as measures meant to make the country safe, the Trump administration’s moves during its first week in office are more likely to weaken the counterterrorism defenses the United States has erected over the past 16 years, several current and former U.S. officials said.

Let us count the ways the Trump regime, headed by regent Bannon, screwed this up.

Through inflammatory rhetoric and hastily drawn executive orders, the administration has alienated allies, including Iraq, provided propaganda fodder to terrorist networks that frequently portray U.S. involvement in the Middle East as a religious crusade, and endangered critical cooperation from often-hidden U.S. partners — whether the leader of a mosque in an American suburb or the head of a Middle East intelligence service.

Allies alienated. Propaganda provided to enemies. Cooperation ended. It’s hard to think of how Trump could have done more for ISIS without shipping them a box of fighter jets (and the traditional cake). Any pretense that the executive order benefits the United States is an illusion.

The executive order signed Friday is ostensibly meant to protect the United States from terrorism, but will almost certainly have the opposite effect, said experts, former senior officials, and lawmakers from both parties.

On Saturday, good-hearted Americans across the country flooded to our nation’s airports to protest Donald Trump’s cruel and inhuman ban on refugees and Muslim immigrants. One of them was investigative filmmaker Jon Ossoff, pictured above, who sped to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the country. Ossoff went with the two men who mentored him when he served as a congressional aide, Reps. John Lewis and Hank Johnson, so that they could all add their voices to the cause of those vindictively harmed by Trump’s shameful executive order.

Ossoff is also running for Congress so that he can join his mentors—and the resistance to Trump on Capitol Hill. He’s running in a special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, the seat that Rep. Tom Price—Trump’s point man for destroying Obamacare—will soon vacate. This district, located in suburban Atlanta, is traditionally conservative turf, but it also reacted with great hostility to Trump: After Mitt Romney carried it by a 61-37 margin four years ago, Trump only won it 48-47 last year.

That makes this a winnable race, especially as Trump’s popularity craters and resistance to his chaotic cruelty intensifies. That’s why we’ve asked you to pitch in for Ossoff, and wow has this community responded. I won’t even bother saying we’ve raised “$X as of Y o’clock” because the thermometer keeps ticking up every second. Just have a look in the top-right corner of this post to see what I mean—and be sure to hit “refresh” when you do.

But as we’ve noted before, this is very difficult race, and voters in this district are long accustomed to voting for Republicans. It’ll take a lot for them to shake free of those old patterns, which is why Ossoff needs as much help as we can possibly give him.

So don’t glance at that thermometer and say, “Wow, that’s a big number.” Look at it and ask, “How can we make that number even bigger?” Then, because you know the answer, click—and give some more.

Please give $5 to Jon Ossoff right now to help him send a message of resistance to Trump.

Despite the rocky start and the fact that he’s not an O.G. Trump loyalist, Sean Spicer’s position as White House press secretary seems secure. How do we know this? Because the guy pulling the strings—that’s right, Steve Bannon himself—is making a big point of supporting him.

Mr. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, rarely speaks to reporters on the record. But he reached out to a reporter unprompted to praise Mr. Spicer after learning of this profile, a sign of the Trump White House’s support for Mr. Spicer after a tumultuous first week. [...]

“He’s a fighter,” Mr. Bannon said in a telephone interview, during which he also urged the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“Sean Spicer is much too polite to the media,” Mr. Bannon added. “I’m the guy who wanted them out of the building.” (He was referring to a proposal, scrapped for now, to move the White House briefing room from its current West Wing home.)

It was awfully nice of Acting President Bannon to take time out of his busy schedule of overruling the Department of Homeland Security in the matter of detaining and deporting green card holders and replacing the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the National Security Council to call a reporter and praise Sean Spicer in a vaguely threatening terms, wasn’t it? Message received: Sean Spicer is the velvet glove over the iron fist of Bannon, so be nice to him, media, or here’s what’s coming next.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if voters knew that by voting for Donald Trump, they were putting Bannon in charge?

Donald Trump has another executive order lined up for Monday, and this one creates America’s very own regulatory Trump-er-dome.

The deep thinking here certainly seems to go along with the kind of planning and forethought that went into Trump’s other executive orders. After all, it’s not as if anyone ever brings new drugs, chemicals, or vehicles to market! Why would we need new regulations?

One thing you can be sure of: The planning for which regulations are shown the door will be just as studied, appropriate, and effective as everything else provided by Team Bad Dude.

Hmm. It would be great if we could say that self-driving cars still have to use their signals … but now seat belts and brake lights definitely have to go!

Why yes, it would be good if we could put some rules on that new pesticide. Just hang on while we take away those pesky warnings about nut allergies and scrub those senseless limits on rat hair in baby food.

No doubt about it, this is going to make America graet agan (spelling rules also subject to elimination).

Customs and Border Patrol officials at Dulles International Airport continue to disregard a judge's order and refuse to allow both attorneys and members of Congress access to the people they've detained there under Trump's Muslim ban order.

It was a court order from a federal judge, which meant it was enforceable by federal law enforcement. But immigration lawyers at Dulles said it didn’t get adequately enforced. Instead, CBP kept the Dulles detainees—and it still isn’t public how many lawful American residents were held there, and for how long—from having face-to-face conversations with attorneys.

Instead, probably as a gesture toward compliance, immigration attorneys told The Daily Beast that they had learned detainees were provided with a copy of Judge Brinkema's order and a paper listing contact information for pro bono immigration attorneys based in Northern Virginia.

Slate reports that two of the detainees were coerced into signing away their green cards and deported. They were not allowed to meet with attorneys, nor were several Democratic members of Congress—Reps. Gerry Connolly and Don Beyer of Virginia and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey—allowed to speak with those detained or even meet with CBP officials.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security—the home agency of CBP—put out a bullshit statement saying that after "issuance of the court orders yesterday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) immediately began taking steps to comply with the orders. […] We are committed to ensuring that all individuals affected by the executive orders, including those affected by the court orders, are being provided all rights afforded under the law." They clearly are not, and immigration lawyers in Virginia are considering going back to the judge to declare the government in contempt of court. 

House and Senate Democrats are demanding accountability from DHS.

Unless your weekend was spent on a distant, isolated island—one where people are still allowed to travel to the United States without the threat of being randomly exported to a country without a Donald Trump-branded golf course—it was hard to miss the spiral of bigotry, bungling, and plain old bastardry that surrounded Trump’s executive order on immigration. In a single week of delivering on his worst promises, Trump has sparked a level of protest the nation hasn’t seen since the 1960s. 

But an immigration ban that conflated illegal use of nationality with unconstitutional basis on religion wasn’t Trump’s only work over the weekend. On Saturday, Trump signed a trio of new executive orders. Among them was one that shuffled the chairs in the National Security Council to ...

… give [Steve] Bannon a regular seat on the principals committee—the meetings of the most senior national security officials, including the secretaries of defense and state.

That memo also states that the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will sit on the principals committee only when the issues to be discussed pertain to their “responsibilities and expertise.” 

So Trump ousted the nation’s highest-ranking general to make room for the real-life Pepe the frog. 

It’s a structure that drew a few comments from someone with experience.

Dozens if not hundreds of career foreign service officers are reportedly planning to oppose Steve Bannon and Donald Trump’s Muslim ban in what Lawfare describes as a “major bureaucratic uprising.” They’re planning a dissent memo, and the draft published at Lawfare hits hard on both the ineffectiveness and immorality of the ban:

A policy which closes our doors to over 200 million legitimate travelers in the hopes of preventing a small number of travelers who intend to harm Americans from using the visa system to enter the United States will not achieve its aim of making our country safer. Moreover, such a policy runs counter to core American values of nondiscrimination, fair play, and extending a warm welcome to foreign visitors and immigrants. Alternative solutions are available to address the risk of terror attacks which are both more effective and in line with Department of State and American values.

They argue that the ban will not keep Americans safer, since, “Despite the Executive Order’s focus on them, a vanishingly small number of terror attacks on U.S. soil have been committed by foreign nationals who recently entered the United States on an immigrant or nonimmigrant visa,” and in particular:

Given the near-absence of terror attacks committed in recent years by Syrian, Iraqi, Irani, Libyan, Somalia, Sudanese, and Yemeni citizens who are in the U.S. after entering on a visa, this ban will have little practical effect in improving public safety.

Not only that, it will “likely be counterproductive,” because it will “sour relations with these six countries, as well as much of the Muslim world,” “increase anti-American sentiment,” “have an immediate and clear humanitarian impact,” and “have a negative impact on the U.S. economy.” And not only that, but “we are better than this”: “This ban stands in opposition to the core American and constitutional values that we, as federal employees, took an oath to uphold.”

It’s brave of these foreign service officers to even discuss such an action challenging Trump’s Muslim ban. He doesn’t do so well with opposition. But the United States needs opposition to his attacks on our values and safety.

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— join Sparky’s List, for an early look at each week’s cartoon, as well as essays, musings, a look behind the scenes, and  more!

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The following Democrats are, per rumor and insider gossip, running for president: Sen. Corey Booker, Gov. Mario Cuomo, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Thus, it bears taking particular note of how they behave to our unfolding national nightmare. 

Wall Street-fave Booker voted with Republicans against drug reimportation to keep Big Pharma happy. Cuomo will be 2020’s Joe Lieberman. We’ll have fun beating the crap out of him. McAuliffe has been a surprisingly good governor, but do we really need another ethically challenged, kinda corrupt candidate? So for now (given this list), the most intriguing potential candidates are Gillibrand, Harris and Klobuchar. Except, well, let’s strike Klobuchar from the list.

“I believe we must fulfill our constitutional responsibility to have a hearing and a vote,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a member of the Judiciary Committee, while urging Mr. Trump to choose a nominee “in the mainstream.”

Ms. Klobuchar, who stood on Sunday with members of her state’s large Somali population, said she was not concerned that the party’s base would turn on its elected officials.

“As a whole, the 48 Democratic senators share their anger and passion and will pull the emergency brake on such things as the executive order, but also some compromise if there are areas we can find common-sense agreements,” she said.

“We must give Republicans the courtesy of hearings and votes even though they denied us that ‘courtesy’ for an entire year because I’m sure Trump will be receptive to our ‘urging’!” 

“I’m not concerned about whether our base will turn out even though there we continue to underestimate the anger and frustration in our base!”

“To make my last point clear, we must find compromise and common ground with Nazi Trump and his cult Nazi party!” 

Fuck this shit. If her read of the protests is “the base will stick with us as we try to find ways to normalize the Nazi-in-Chief”, then we can safely move to other choices.

Donald Trump started his daily tweet storm with a claim that 

Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage, protesters and the tears of Senator Schumer. Secretary Kelly said that all is going well with very few problems. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!

There are a few problems with that. Not only did Secretary Kelly not even know the order was being signed until he saw it on TV, Trump was also apparently getting everything he knows directly from the Fox News chyron. The actual number of people trapped by his ill-planned order is considerably higher.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official said Saturday that in the first 23 hours the order was in effect, 375 people had been detained on arrival in the U.S., prevented from boarding flights at their point of departure or intercepted while en route to the U.S.

That Delta outage didn’t occur until Sunday evening, so it’s unclear how it contributed to problems which began on Saturday morning. And if Chuck Schumer was crying about anything, it was surely about how Trump’s order is a historic low-mark for the nation.

The targeting of nations that are overwhelmingly Muslim recalls some of the darker moments of American history … historic parallels could include the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the witch hunts by Senator Joseph McCarthy against alleged communists in politics and the arts in the 1950s.

But if Trump failed to plan, or even let Homeland Security know what Bannon had cooked up. He had a reason.

Donald Trump started the morning tweeting that: 

Secretary Kelly said that all is going well with very few problems.

Which is so reassuring considering ...

Donald Trump acted so swiftly on closing US borders to refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries that his new Secretary of Homeland Security, John F. Kelly, found out about it from broadcast news.

Bigotry is such a priority in the Trump regime, that there was no time to run it past the Secretary of Homeland Security. That’s pretty amazing for an order that trump insists was done for the purposes of homeland security. However, it perfectly emblematic for the actual results of Trump's order.

The global confusion that has since erupted is the story of a White House that rushed to enact, with little regard for basic governing, a core campaign promise that Mr. Trump made to his most fervent supporters. In his first week in office, Mr. Trump signed other executive actions with little or no legal review, but his order barring refugees has had the most explosive implications.

Leading off

● WI Redistricting: Late in 2016, a federal district court struck down Wisconsin's Republican-drawn state Assembly map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. On Friday, the court followed up that decision by ordering the legislature to craft new districts for the 2018 elections by Nov. 1.

Of course, those same lawmakers were responsible for creating the very maps that were struck down in the first place, so it remains to be seen how the court will treat any remedial plans that legislators come up with, but this latest ruling represents progress in a case that's crucial for redistricting reform.

Wisconsin is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country: Democrats won the statewide popular vote for the Assembly in 2012, but the GOP's maps helped them maintain their majority. New maps could upend that. But even more importantly, this ruling might also have much broader implications, because a likely appeal to the Supreme Court could set the stage for a national precedent constraining partisan gerrymandering.

An earlier Supreme Court ruling called Vieth v. Jubelirer previously held that partisan gerrymandering could be unconstitutional. But in that case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, as the deciding vote, refused to strike down the particular map in question for lack of a manageable standard to determine when impermissible partisan gerrymandering takes place.

The plaintiffs in Wisconsin, however, have sought to overcome that problem by proposing one such standard called the "efficiency gap" that would examine how many votes get "wasted" in each election. Under this test, if one party routinely wins landslide victories in a few seats while the other party wins much more modest yet secure margins in the vast majority of districts, it could signify a gerrymander that has gone so far as to infringe upon the rights of voters to free speech and equal protection.

While the federal district court did not rely solely on the plaintiffs' "efficiency gap" in reaching its decision, the opinion appears to have been precisely designed with Kennedy's Vieth ruling in mind. Should plaintiffs ultimately succeed in persuading the Supreme Court's perennial swing justice to finally set forth a standard to judge when partisan gerrymandering crosses the line, courts could begin striking down redistricting plans across the nation and at all levels. Republicans have gerrymandered 55 percent of congressional districts and most state legislatures nationwide, so such a decision could have extremely far-reaching consequences.