Our national weekend loyalty test
How did you score?
I spent a lot of this weekend tweeting and re-tweeting the news and opinions swirling around Friday’s executive order on immigration.
As the descendants of immigrants on every side, I’ve been pretty clear how I feel about this. I’m all for thorough vetting of people who want to visit or live in this country. I’d think most Americans would say the same in some form or another. What “thorough” means is a topic of fierce political debate, and that’s as it should be.
But I’m not for chaos. I’m not for a poorly worded and unevenly interpreted executive order that created a vast grey swamp through which hard-working, ground-level Customs and Border Protection officials now wade. An interpretation that keeps an elderly woman, an eleven- month old child, and people every age in between in airport detention for more than 30 hours. Interpretation that leads them to turn back people from boarding flights to the US, even though those people had the legal right and documentation to do so before the stroke of a pen at the Pentagon.
But sitting here on Sunday afternoon, watching the world stream by on Twitter and cable news, it occurs to me that whatever the verdict on Monday, or whatever the polls say a week from now, the new Trump Administration was extremely successful in one regard. They just administered one hell of a loud, noisy, messy loyalty test.
Here are just a few things we know now that we didn’t on Friday:
Which Republican Senators criticized some portion of the order, and which ones stayed silent (spoiler alert: most).
Which countries threatened to withhold visas to American contractors and journalists and which leaders merely suggested they might make representations at a future date.
Which airports let which US Representatives and Senators in to see the detainees, and which didn’t (looking at you there Dulles).
Which lawyers raced to the airport.
Which veterans protested the detention of Iraqi interpreters, especially the ones who saved their lives.
Which tech leaders publicly addressed the order, who showed up to protest at an airport (Google it) , and who stayed silent.
Which organizations waded in to fight on one side or the other. The ACLU was no surprise. That the New York Taxi Workers Alliance held a work stoppage at JFK, and once you thought it through, that made sense. Uber’s independent contractors kept working, which outraged some of their users, even though Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was one of the tech CEO’s to speak out. Then Lyft gave a million bucks to the ACLU and the circle was complete.
Most importantly:
Which federal judges ruled against the order to prevent more stranded travelers from being put on planes back to countries they no longer considered home.
That’s a lot of decisions made in one weekend. A lot of principled stands on both sides of the argument. And it’s a whole lot of data for a President for whom loyalty is paramount.
All in less than 48 hours.
So depending on whose test you took this weekend, you either passed because you refused to let Congresspeople in to see the detainees, (hey Dulles, it’s me again, how you doin’) or you passed with flying colors and 10 million dollars in new donations for jumping into emergency lawyer mode.
Maybe you passed because you went on Meet The Press and (mostly) did let Chuck Todd get your goat.
Maybe you passed a progressive purity test because you got out and protested for two weekend in a row, or you passed that pop social media outrage quiz because because you deleted Uber, even though you know you’re just going to download it again when Lyft doesn’t have enough drivers.
Maybe you took a pass on the whole thing altogether and went to a bookstore. Or the movies. Or watched your kid’s big game. Or ran errands. Or ran a 10k. Or blew 10k in Vegas. Or blew a —
You know what? Never mind.
But it’s worth keeping in mind that for everyone who passed some sort of loyalty test this weekend, exactly that many people also failed.
And it will not go unnoticed.
