Trump's tweets just might forever prevent his 'Muslim travel ban'

Perhaps no politician is as compelled to cram his foot into his own mouth as President Donald Trump.

Two judges recently issued temporary blocks of the White House's third attempt to ban travel from several majority-Muslim nations, and one cited Trump's tweets as part of the reason the ban should not go forward.

Had it proceeded apace, the ban would have gone into effect Wednesday, when it would have prevented many citizens of majority-Muslim Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen from coming to the United States. It will still effect citizens of North Korea and Venezuela, both of which were mentioned in the ban but unaffected by the rulings of Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii and Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland.

Chuang's ruling described how the president undermined his administration's attempt at policy.

"...while defendants assert that the proclamation’s travel ban was arrived at through the routine operations of the government bureaucracy, the public was witness to a different genealogy," he wrote. That "different genealogy" came about through the president's tweets.

The judge lays out how several of Trump's tweets "do not offer 'persuasive' rejection of the president’s prior calls for a Muslim ban."

Those tweets may continue to haunt any further attempts at a "travel" ban, should this third attempt fail like its predecessors. Trump's tweets can continually be cited as evidence that the president is simply trying to prevent Muslims from coming to the U.S., in violation of the Constitution.

"There's not really any time limit on evidence in a case as long as the evidence can be authenticated and it's relevant," said Jan Jacobowitz, a law professor at the University of Miami.

Several lawyers said Trump's tweets are a huge impediment to the ban because, in the absence of a significant national security threat stemming from these countries, his tweets lay bare the ban's evidently discriminatory intent.

Katie Eyer, a law professor at Rutgers University who specializes in anti-discrimination law, said it's "hard to speculate" about what might make Trump's tweets less relevant to these attempted "travel" bans. If the administration was able to tailor "to what the national security community has said are actual risks," she said Trump's team might "fare better" in court.

Even so, the president's tweets have laid a trail of intent. A restructuring of the the travel ban wouldn't prevent lawyers from stringing the president's tweets together in an attempt to show its discriminatory intent, according to Ryan Garcia, a law professor at the University of Texas and the coauthor of "Social Media Law in a Nutshell."

The White House may eventually put forward a fundamentally different travel ban, but the president's tweets will still be a part of its DNA.