President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Nashville on March 15. | AP Photo Trump: Travel ban block 'makes us look weak' During a rally in Tennessee, the president blasted a last-minute court ruling that halted his second attempt at a travel ban.

It was a rare moment of vulnerability: President Donald Trump, onstage in front of an adoring Nashville crowd, admitted Wednesday night that the latest restraining order blocking his travel ban was a major political setback.

"The ruling makes us look weak,” Trump said, while the packed arena loudly booed the Hawaii federal judge who halted, nationwide, the president’s ban on refugees from some majority-Muslim countries, hours before it was set to go into effect.


The moment was somewhat fraught for Trump — a return to the campaign trail that energizes him, but this time with a key campaign promise hitting its second major legal roadblock in under two months, and another promise, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, facing an intra-party siege.

“By the way, we no longer are [weak],” Trump continued, appearing visibly angry as he delivered his remarks. “Believe me.”

Trump made a delayed appearance inside the packed Municipal Auditorium, where local speakers, country singers and bands warmed up the waiting crowd for about two hours. His remarks were written last minute, White House sources said. And backstage, White House officials traveling with him tried to cheer the president up by showing him remarks that Harvard University Law professor Alan Dershowitz made on Greta Van Susteren’s MSNBC show, arguing that the Supreme Court would never uphold the court’s ruling.

Once on stage, Trump vowed to keep up the fight and noted that Dershowitz said he could win. “We’re going to take our case as far as it needs to go, including all the way up to the Supreme Court,” he said, repeatedly trashing the Ninth Circuit, calling the decision an example of “unprecedented judicial overreach.”

"You don't think this was done by a judge for political reasons?" he said, sarcastically. "No?"

Trump called the ban a "watered down version of our first one," and noted that he preferred the original version, which did not exempt green card and visa holders from the ban. And even as the administration continued to argue in legal briefs that the executive order was not about Muslims, Trump on stage brought up "radical Islamic terrorists."

His tough-guy remarks were heartening to some activists fighting the ban. "He should just continue talking, because he's making our arguments for us," said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

But behind the scenes, his aides were scrambling to spin a legal setback that comes in the midst of a major legislative fight on health care. On that front, the White House is trying to score a major legislative win it desperately needs, but it is selling another initiative that in reality is falling short of a campaign promise. On the trail last year, Trump vowed that no American would lose coverage under the plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act -- but the Congressional Budget Office earlier this week estimated that 24 million Americans would be left uninsured under the new plan.

On Wednesday, the health care law received scant attention, and Trump's heart didn't seem to be in it when he spoke.

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Wednesday night’s ruling could also impact the Supreme Court confirmation process for Judge Neil Gorsuch — one of the most smooth-sailing initiatives launched by the administration — because Democrats may now have a greater incentive to stall his appointment.

“He can’t change it again,” Dershowitz said in an interview. “That would be embarrassing. He’s going to seek an expedited appeal from the Ninth Circuit, and the Democrats will try to slow down the Gorsuch nomination so he won’t be there in time to break a four-four tie.”

The Hawaii judge’s ruling was the second legal action to stop Trump’s travel ban hours before it was set to go into effect. Last month, a federal court in Seattle stopped an earlier version of the executive order, prompting Trump to tweet defiantly: “SEE YOU IN COURT.” This time, he reacted in person, from the stage, rather than on Twitter.

Thursday morning, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Trump's complaint that legal hurdles for his travel ban make the nation look weak were misguided. Instead, Schiff said, "the real issue here is, that he is upset is that it makes him look weak."

"It makes the administration look less than competent," the California congressman said in an interview on CNN's "New Day." "This is why I think, again, he's lashing out at federal judges that now, too, have issued the same decision. But I think that's at the heart of his upset about this."

Internally, senior White House officials were comparing the setback to the early legal barriers that President Barack Obama encountered in trying to implement the Affordable Care Act.

He’s confident he will prevail on the merits,” the senior White House official said, noting that Obama plodded forward — and eventually won — every time he received a negative legal opinion. Trump’s argument, the official said, would be similar: pointing out that one judge represented one court, while he was trying to pass a law for the nation.

Blocking the ban was also seen as a come-uppance for some of Trump’s own advisers, who tried to defend the new version of the ban in media appearances.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson quoted a Fox News appearance from senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who argued that “fundamentally, you’re still going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country” even after the rewrite. The judge said the new executive order was similar in intent to the first one — and that it targeted Muslims.

“These plainly-worded statements, made in the months leading up to and contemporaneous with the signing of the Executive Order, and, in many cases, made by the Executive himself, betray the Executive Order’s stated secular purpose,” the ruling said.

Dawsey reported from Nashville. Additional reporting by Shane Goldmacher, Nahal Toosi and Louis Nelson.