President Trump on Sunday defended his executive order banning refugees, migrants and foreign nationals from seven mostly Muslim countries from entering the United States but offered little clarity amid the chaos of legal challenges and national protests.
In a statement issued by the White House late Sunday, the president compared his order to action taken by then-President Obama in 2011 to give new scrutiny to visas for Iraqi refugees, though by almost any measure Trump’s order was far more sweeping.
“To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting,” Trump said in the statement.
https://qz.com/897616/rudy-giuliani-says-donald-trump-asked-how-to-make-a-muslim-ban-legal/
But comments yesterday by former New York City mayor and Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani during an interview on Fox News suggest that the ban, at its origin, was indeed aimed squarely at Muslims as a whole.
“Does the ban have anything to do with religion?,” Giuliani’s interviewer, Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, asks. “How did the president decide the seven countries?”
Giuliani appears to relish the opportunity to recount his role in helping Trump create the ban. “OK, I’ll tell you the whole history of it,” he tells Pirro. He goes on:
“So when he first announced it he said ‘Muslim ban.’”
Unbelievable.