After President Trump’s late-night proclamation of a new travel ban on 12 countries considered by the administration to be national security concerns, it was no surprise to see liberals both in office and on CNN and MSNBC up in arms over it on Thursday morning. Their complaints were all too familiar: this was nothing more than a furthering of Trump’s racist agenda, and his connection of the ban to the recent terror attack in Boulder was just a cheap excuse for a distraction from criticisms of the Big Beautiful Bill.

Naturally, evidence against these baseless claims was not difficult to find.

CNN News Central was among the first to harp on Trump’s decision, where host John Berman discussed the legality of the ban with attorney Shan Wu. When asked by Berman whether or not it mattered “that the President overnight justified it based on the attack in Colorado from an Egyptian national, and that Egypt wasn't on the list,” Wu was quick to ridicule the decision: 

That does not help it. That's an example of some of the loose factual connections. As you just pointed out, that's not even a country on the list. Also, this whole issue of people overstaying their visas, you know, that's really a United States enforcement issue. Makes very little sense to me at least, saying that the countries responsible for having a larger percentage of individuals overstaying their visa, that's kind of a pretty weak factual predicate.

Of course, a reading of Trump’s proclamation revealed that the ban included a commission for investigation into Egypt’s vetting capabilities to see if any restrictions would be necessary.

“At the end of the day,” Wu ultimately admitted, “I think it falls into this catchall authority that the court has given him.” Berman also conceded, “the language they use did seem more careful. The fact that they sort of telegraphed this early on and sounded like they were studying it, per se, also might help their cause.”

Whether they like it or not, the media can’t pretend the ban was some sort of ploy from the Trump Administration to cover up other issues. It was “telegraphed early on,” and the recent terror attack gave clear grounds for expediting it. But liberal lawmakers still weren’t ready to see it that way. On MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera Reports, Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) was given a soapbox to speak out against the ban:

We must never believe that this is a normal set of behaviors, after all – and what that person said, I'd like to know the rational basis for this choice of 12 countries. Again, Egypt isn't in it, and he connected it to the Egyptian national’s attack on 15 people. 

(...)

And the data shows that if you take all of these 12 countries and take a look at terrorist activity as a result of it, over the course of many years, there has been one terrorist attack in this country from anybody from these 12 countries. There's no rational basis.

No rational basis? Even more irrational would be following Dean’s logic, where we would have to wait for a terror attack from a country before we restricted travel.

There were plenty of reasons to want to restrict immigrants from the countries listed in Trump’s proclamation, such as the lack of sufficient governmental immigration screening (Afghanistan, Eritrea, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Sudan) or being actively opposed to the United States in some capacity (Iran, Yemen’s Houthi terrorist rebels), not to mention the political unrest and civil wars most of these nations faced.

The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read.

CNN News Central
June 5, 2025
8:28 a.m. EST

(...)

[ON SCREEN HEADLINE: Trump Issues Travel Ban for 12 Countries, Citing Security Risks]

JOHN BERMAN: How likely is it that this travel ban will stick this time? 

SHAN WU: I think it's pretty likely. The last time around in Trump One, there were basically three iterations of it, and it did reach the Supreme Court that time. And they basically gave President Trump and future presidents the raw power to do that, relying on this being really a core power of the president, conducting foreign policy, you know, the chief diplomat, that type of analysis. So I think there'll certainly be challenges here. 

[ON SCREEN HEADLINE: New Trump Travel Ban on Citizens from 12 Nations: “We Don’t Want Them”]

They've been careful, I think the administration has been, to stay away from the mistakes the first time around, making it sound like it's purely retaliatory or discriminatory. They're invoking the national security issues, so I think by the time it finally does get back to the Supreme Court, which I think is likely, they're probably gonna uphold it.

BERMAN: Does it matter that the President overnight justified it based on the attack in Colorado from an Egyptian national, and that Egypt wasn't on the list?

WU: That does not help it. [Laughs] That's an example of some of the loose factual connections. 

[ON SCREEN HEADLINE: White House Official: Trump Decided to Sign Travel Ban Proclamation After Antisemetic Attack in Colorado]

As you just pointed out, that's not even a country on the list. Also, this whole issue of people overstaying their visas, you know, that's really a United States enforcement issue. Makes very little sense to me at least, saying that the countries responsible for having a larger percentage of individuals overstaying their visa, that's kind of a pretty weak factual predicate. But at the end of the day, I think it falls into this catchall authority that the court has given him.

BERMAN: And the language they use did seem more careful. The fact that they sort of telegraphed this early on and sounded like they were studying it, per se, also might help their cause.

(…)

MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera Reports
June 5, 2025
10:16 a.m. EST

(...)

[ON SCREEN HEADLINE: Trump Announces New Travel Ban on 12 Countries, Expansion of Controversial First-Term Policy]

ANA CABRERA: What strikes me about some of that is it feels like such a far cry from the outrage and those protests that triggered – that were triggered immediately after the, quote unquote, “Muslim travel ban” the first time around. Do you think Americans see things differently now?

REP. MADELEINE DEAN (D-PA): I worry about that, to be very honest. That one was so nakedly an attempt to ban people of a particular faith. And that was exposed back in 2017. I do worry that Mr. Trump's behavior is so outrageous, but it's becoming normalized.

We must never believe that this is a normal set of behaviors, after all – and what that person said, I'd like to know the rational basis for this choice of 12 countries. Again, Egypt isn't in it, and he connected it to the Egyptian national’s attack on 15 people, injuring 15 people, including a holocaust survivor. There's no connection, there's no rational basis.

And the data shows that if you take all of these 12 countries and take a look at terrorist activity as a result of it, over the course of many years, there has been one terrorist attack in this country from anybody from these 12 countries. There's no rational basis. Again, it's a distraction, because look at what we’re not talking about.

(...)