A Supreme Court Reset and the Monday Night Massacre That Wasn't

It was a difficult weekend for the Trump administration as it sought to implement and defend its most controversial executive order to date, the travel ban. Fortunately for Trump, there's a chance to reset from the executive order fiasco with Tuesday night's announcement of his nominee for the Supreme Court seat formerly held by the late Antonin Scalia. The president has decided on a nominee, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told the press Monday, but the administration has been tight-lipped about who the selection is. There are rumors the top picks are federal circuit court judges Thomas Hardiman and Neil Gorsuch.

Whoever it is, the announcement promises to be must-see TV: Trump's decision to announce at 8 p.m. Eastern, in prime time, is a shrewd bit of programming savvy from the entertainer-in-chief. (By contrast, Barack Obama announced both Sonia Sotomayor's and Elena Kagan's nominations just after 10 a.m., right in the middle of the workday. Boring!)

Invited to the White House announcement are several Republican senators in leadership and on the Judiciary committee—including Lindsey Graham, a frequent critic of Trump who voted to confirm both Sotomayor and Kagan. No word if Graham will attend the announcement, but the White House's strategy is to have Republican senators rally around the Court nominee quickly after the announcement. If that plan succeeds, it will be a much-desired contrast to the confusion and uneasiness expressed by GOP members of Congress over the travel ban executive order. It will also serve as a counterpoint to what the White House perceives as Democratic obstructionism over Trump's cabinet appointees and (preemptively) against the Court nominee.

Fumbling the Travel Ban

In the White House, there's a general feeling that while the policy of restricting entry from the seven Muslim countries listed in Friday's executive order is right, nearly everything about the public rollout could have been done better. As one senior White House official put it, they "fumbled" the outreach—to members of Congress, to the relevant departments, and even internally.

The White House remains coy about the extent to which the department secretaries were involved in the drafting of the order. "All appropriate agencies and individuals that needed to be part of the process were," said Sean Spicer on Monday. "Everybody was kept in the loop at the level necessary to ensure that we rolled it out properly." But no one at the White House has denied the reports that Homeland Security secretary John Kelly was not fully briefed on the order until it was being signed by President Trump at the Department of Defense. As the Associated Press reports, neither Kelly, Defense secretary James Mattis, nor Secretary of State designate Rex Tillerson "were aware of the details" until Trump signed it.