Lifted this article by Matt Levine from Bloomberg. I copied and pasted the relevant parts. Original here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-30/immigration-orders-and-odd-tenders
I think sometimes about how Anthony Scaramucci compared the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule to Dred Scott, the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting slavery and ruling that African-Americans can’t be citizens. "The left-leaning Department of Labor has made a decision to discriminate against a class of people who they deem to be adding no value,” said Scaramucci, a fund-of-funds marketer who was also an adviser and spokesman for Donald Trump’s campaign. And he said that, if Trump were elected, he’d repeal the fiduciary rule.
Trump, meanwhile, never said that. Instead he promised to ban Muslims from traveling to the United States. Scaramucci tried not to think about this: “I’ll make a prediction right now that he will not put a ban on Muslims coming into America,” he once told Gawker. Did he believe that? Or did he think that the Department of Labor rule requiring financial advisers to put their customers’ interests ahead of their own is the great moral evil of our time, comparable to slavery, and that a ban on Muslim immigration was an acceptable trade-off to end that evil?
Now Trump has his Muslim ban, sort of. On Friday – Holocaust Remembrance Day – Trump issued an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S. The ban covered U.S. lawful permanent residents who have spent years following the law and building lives here, interpreters who heroically helped the U.S. military, children of U.S. citizens, dissidents who fought hostile regimes, scientific researchers, Syrian Christians, British Olympians, and endangered refugee children who were carefully vetted to be allowed into the U.S.
But you know what Trump hasn’t done yet? Repeal the fiduciary rule! Or even talk about it. Its future remains uncertain, and while there is a good chance that it will eventually be repealed, big brokerages are moving to implement its changes now anyway.
This is a widespread pattern. Many people in the business and financial and technology communities listened to what Trump said, and cheerily assumed he’d do something completely different. Sure he talked about restricting trade and banning Muslim immigrants, but what they heard was that he’d enact “sensible immigration policy” and pro-growth trade agreements, reduce taxes, cut back regulation and generally improve conditions for business. As I said in November:
Peter Thiel and others said that Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally.” Taking Trump literally means believing that he’ll do what he says. Taking him seriously means believing that he’ll do what you want.
And what has happened so far? Immigration bans (with more to come), abandoned trade agreements, “alternative facts,” unprompted promises to bring back torture. And what has not happened so far? Tax policy is a complete mystery, with an unclear and walked-back promise to impose a border tax. Health-care policy is even more mysterious. Trump has made vague promises to cut regulations by 75 percent, but his specific regulatory focus seems to be on increasing penalties on companies that move operations abroad. Everything Trump literally said is coming literally true; everything the serious people heard remains an unserious hope. Businesses may eventually get the tax and regulatory reform they wanted, but it’s not a priority. The technology industry, and some others, are beginning to figure this out:
Trump has “had this extraordinary honeymoon where Wall Street has kind of discounted all the negative aspects,” Richard Fenning, the CEO of consultancy Control Risks, told Bloomberg Television. As companies react to the migrant ban, “perhaps that honeymoon is starting to be over,” he said.
More than that, though. One upshot of Trump’s executive order is that United States lawful permanent residents, who have jumped through years of hoops to comply with the intricate immigration rules enshrined in U.S. law, are no longer protected by that law. They can be deported at the whim of the President, or his advisers, or a Border Patrol agent. (The order originally barred lawful permanent residents, though after some confusion, now it will not, unless the Secretary of Homeland Security wants it to. On the other hand, soon it may apply to citizens.) The nation of laws that they immigrated to is gone, replaced by a nation of arbitrary rule.
If the president can, without consulting the courts or Congress, banish U.S. lawful permanent residents, then he can do anything. If there is no rule of law for some people, there is no rule of law for anyone. The reason the U.S. is a good place to do business is that, for the last 228 years, it has built a firm foundation on the rule of law. It almost undid that in a weekend. That’s bad for business.