'Clear Adjustments Needed' for White House

What did the Trump administration know about Friday's "extreme vetting" executive order, and when did they know it?

This weekend's fast-evolving controversy over the order, which bars entry into the United States for 90 days for people from seven Muslim nations, is President Donald Trump's first substantive and serious public policy snafu. The chaos that erupted in American airports—both in the confusion about what law enforcement was expected to do with visa-holders arriving in the U.S. from those countries, and in the protests that emerged there—set the tone for how everyone processed the whole executive order. What did the order say? Who was affected by it? Was it constitutional? Was it effective? It was as if we needed a total and complete shutdown on news developments about the travel ban until we could figure out what the hell was going on.

This confusion wasn't just happening on the level of the refugees and visa-holders, the law enforcement officers at airports, and for normal people watching the news at home. People at the highest levels of the federal government seemed just as confused. The New York Times has the perfect anecdote to demonstrate this:

As President Trump signed a sweeping executive order on Friday, shutting the borders to refugees and others from seven largely Muslim countries, the secretary of homeland security was on a White House conference call getting his first full briefing on the global shift in policy.

Gen. John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, had dialed in from a Coast Guard plane as he headed back to Washington from Miami. Along with other top officials, he needed guidance from the White House, which had not asked his department for a legal review of the order.