President Donald Trump's actions prompted mass protests at some of the nation’s largest airports, where demonstrators chanted “let them in” at international terminals. | Getty NYT, WSJ editorial boards blast Trump's immigration order

The immigration and refugee ban instituted via an executive order from President Donald Trump late last week is “bigoted, cowardly” and “self-defeating,” The New York Times wrote in a scathing editorial published over the weekend.

The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial board writes typically from the opposite end of the editorial spectrum, wrote over the weekend that the Trump administration’s move “blunderbuss and broad,” adding that the policy was “poorly explained and prepared for.”


The president sowed at least a weekend’s worth of controversy on Friday when he signed an executive order temporarily banning immigrants from seven predominantly-Muslim nations and outright banning the admittance of refugees from Syria. The orders quickly triggered confusion at America’s airports, where even some green card-holders were detained for hours. Trump’s order was challenged in court and rebuked in one way or another by multiple judges. The Journal labeled the White House’s legal review of the order “slipshod”

The moves also prompted mass protests at some of the nation’s largest airports, where demonstrators chanted “let them in” at international terminals. Crowds also gathered in Washington outside the White House and along Pennsylvania Avenue at Trump’s luxury hotel.

Echoing language the president used often on the campaign trail, Trump’s executive order “claims to spare America from people who would commit acts of violence against women and those who persecute people on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation,” the Times noted.

“A president who bragged about sexually assaulting women and a vice president who has supported policies that discriminate against gay people might well fear that standard themselves,” it said.

That the order was released on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Times added, “spoke of the president’s callousness and indifference to history, to America’s deepest lessons about its own values.”

Both newspapers argued that Trump’s order was too broad, offering rhetorical ammunition to terrorist recruiters eager to portray the U.S. as at war with the Muslim world. The Times wrote that “extremist groups will trumpet this order to spread the notion, today more credible than ever, that the United States is at war with Islam rather than targeting terrorists.”

The Journal, more muted in its criticism, said Trump’s order “lets the jihadists portray the order as applying to all Muslims even though it does not. The smarter play would have been simply to order more diligent screening without a blanket ban.” That the order did not carve out exceptions for translators and others who aided U.S. forces and fought alongside them could have long-term consequences for the nation.

"The U.S. will fight wars in foreign lands in the future, and we will need local allies who will be watching how we treat Iraqis, Kurds and other battle comrades now,” the Journal wrote. “The reaction to the refugee order is also a warning that controversial policy changes can’t merely be dropped on the public like a stun grenade. They need their own extreme internal vetting to make sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need to be sold and explained to the public—again and again.”

Those from Trump’s own party would do well, the Times wrote, to think critically about their stance on the White House’s immigration order from last Friday. The newspaper singled out Defense Secretary James Mattis, who it wrote was “clear-eyed” during the campaign about the notion of a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., a policy Trump proposed but later backed away from.

“Republicans in Congress who remain quiet or tacitly supportive of the ban should recognize that history will remember them as cowards,” the Times wrote.