It's been a tough month for whatever qualifies these days as the White House brain trust, as their rollout of President Trump's long-promised Muslim ban turned out to be an embarrassing failure, especially for an administration desperate to prove it has any idea how to go about the task of governing. Yet even after getting righteously dunked on by the courts, the administration's second iteration of the ban, which was set to take effect at midnight on Thursday, sure looked an awful lot like the first, almost as if someone had forgotten to turn off "Track Changes" before sending the revised draft. It happens to the best of us, and also to Steve Bannon, I suppose.

Sure enough, on Wednesday, another federal judge—this time in Hawaii—issued a nationwide temporary restraining order, this time barring the enforcement of Muslim Ban 2.0. While last month's court order focused on the White House's suspiciously slippery rationales for offered in support of the executive order, the Hawaii court took a different tack, highlighting months of statements from members of the administration that their Muslim ban was, in fact, intended to be a Muslim ban. No one was safe from the judicial dragging that ensued.

Stephen Miller, the strategy wunderkind who went on TV last month and promised that the revised executive order would have "the same basic policy outcome" as the first? Yep, the court saw that, genius.

Rudy Giuliani, a man who wakes up every day trying to think of new, exciting ways to get on television and yell something offensive and nonsensical about brown people? Yes, his take was certainly noted.


And of course, President Trump himself, who spent months loudly promising to anyone who would listen that he would implement this flagrantly unconstitutional policy if elected president? The Court is very much aware of all those things you said, sir. Not even the nonsense you mumbled under your breath when signing the executive order went unnoticed! (In a very on-brand move, immediately after the ruling came out, the president continued undermining his position while speaking at a rally in Nashville. Learning is hard.)

For good measure, the judge threw in an "and that's not all" footnote, too. In other words, President Trump and his friends professed their intent to discriminate so often and with such conviction that the court, in the interest of saving paper, didn't even bother to lay out all the evidence.

The administration, in its briefs, had urged the judge to evaluate the executive order on the merits only, without regard to the surrounding context. The court's rejection of this argument is about as condescending as a temporary restraining order can get:


There are two lessons here. First, you should never, ever discriminate on the basis of religion. But if for some bigoted and/or stupid reason you decide to do so anyway, don't spend months repeatedly promising people that you're going to do just that, and then insult the court's intelligence by trying to convince it that, nah, kidding, you actually meant something else all along. It won't end well.

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