Story
Hawaii jumps the new travel ban before it can breathe
Hawaii moved to challenge Trump’s revised travel ban almost immediately, signaling that the White House had not bought itself much time or much legitimacy with the rewrite.
Edition · March 7, 2017
Trump’s revised travel ban meets its first courtroom ambush
The administration rolled out a softer-looking version of the travel ban, and Hawaii moved immediately to stop it. That gave Trump a fresh legal headache on the same day his White House was still trying to sell the rewrite as a fix.
March 7, 2017 was another reminder that Trump-world’s favorite strategy—break it, rename it, defend it later—was not exactly fooling the courts. The revised travel ban had barely left the printer when Hawaii prepared a challenge, arguing the new order was still unconstitutional and still functioned like the old one. The day’s other big Trump screwup was the continuing fallout from the president’s wiretap accusation, which kept drawing mockery, denials, and demands for evidence. The through-line was ugly for the White House: a legal rewrite that did not buy much peace, and a messaging stunt that kept looking thinner every time somebody asked for proof.
Closing take
Trump spent March 7 trying to make a bad week look orderly. Instead, the day showed an administration still confused about how to clean up its own messes: when one controversy gets redrafted, the critics just file a lawsuit; when another gets shouted onto Twitter, it only gets more embarrassing. This is what happens when the cleanup plan is mostly vibes, substitutions, and denial.
Ranked by how bad the fuckup was
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
Story
Trump’s wiretap claim keeps collapsing under basic scrutiny
The president’s accusation that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower kept drawing denials and embarrassment, with the central problem unchanged: nobody had produced evidence.