News Reports(1) Priebus made two public statements today.
Notably absent from his statement was anything about people with other types of visa, or anything about the DHS' power to unilaterally revoke green cards in bulk.
A point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements, which is not normally the Chief of Staff's job.
2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that the intent of yesterday's order was very much a ban on Muslims, described in those words, and he was among the people Trump asked how they could find a way to do this legally.
Notable in this is that the DHS' lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently out of the country wouldn't be stranded?-?and they were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Also notable is that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.
4) The Guardian is reporting that the "Mass resignations" of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House.
As the diagram below shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.
As the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban are coming down.
The article points out another point worth highlighting: "In the past, the state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and Trump's immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus are making their own calls."
5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020.
At inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump.
Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump's hotels and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia's state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown.
First, the decision to first block, and then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long.
Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders.
CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court's order, citing "Upper management," and the DHS made a formal statement that they would continue to follow the President's orders.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government.
This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.
Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d'état against the United States.
ID: 5574
NAME: trial-balloon-for-a-coup
DESCRIPTION: [SUMMARY] trial balloon for a coup ] by Yonatan Zunger @ medium.com - Zunger outlines his theory on how the leadership of the current US government has initiated a coup against the country and lays out some of the possible motives behind it.
AUTHOR: article.author/s
EDITOR: article.editor/s
PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s
STATUS: Write
PRIORITY: -5
OWNER ID: 75