Donald Trump’s Grandiose Goal Against Himself

A federal judge in Hawaii has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s second travel ban. The U.S. president railed against the decision at a rally in Nashville.

Banging one’s head against the wall might sometimes seem like the shortest route — but it is most often not successful. Anyone who has painfully experienced this usually learns a lesson from it.

That is, of course, unless he considers himself to be the greatest president of all time and is named Donald Trump: the American head of government had scarcely suffered shipwreck on his revised travel ban for people from primarily Muslim countries in the courts when he declared, enraged, on Wednesday evening that he now wants to return again to the harsher first version of the order and fight it up to the highest court “which is what I wanted to do in the first place.”

It is characteristic that Trump didn’t even wait until his legal team had studied the 43-page judgement by Hawaiian Federal Judge Derrick Kahala Watson. The courageous judge explains rather convincingly why the immigration ban at least approaches religious discrimination.

It’s Only About Ideology for Donald Trump

Yet constitutional objections bother Donald Trump as little as warnings that he is ultimately serving the radical Islamists’ distorted picture of the U.S. with the blanket blocking out of arbitrarily selected nationalities and thereby more likely creating less security.

It’s only about ideology for Donald Trump — and his over-sized ego that cannot accept dissent from a brazen provincial judge.

Civil Society and Media Are Wide-Awake

The supporters of a liberal, Western social order can, however, take new hope: in spite of increasing authoritarian tendencies of their president, civil society and the media in the U.S. are wide-awake and the courts are not letting themselves be browbeaten in regards to their independence.

To be sure, the decision in Hawaii only temporarily suspends the immigration ban that was to have gone into effect on Thursday. But with his emotional outburst, Trump himself minimized the chances for another decision on the main issue.

For that, proof would be necessary that the second executive order had nothing to do with the unconstitutional first order. Trump himself now drove this fiction ad absurdum with his wild threat.