WHEN HONESTY IS FATAL YOU'RE DOING THE WRONG THING:

Insisting that the executive order is a "travel ban" is problematic on multiple legal levels.

First, there's the tone of contempt for the legal process itself. The lawyers in question are Trump's: The opposition is happy to call the order a travel ban. When you insult your own lawyers, the rest of the legal system tends to notice.

As for insulting the lower court judges who have treated the order as a travel ban, that's practically begging the Supreme Court to vindicate those judges. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch, during his confirmation process, suggested that attacks on the judiciary trouble judges. The rest of the justices, who unlike Gorsuch owe Trump nothing, are going to be extremely vigilant about the legitimacy of the judiciary as a whole.

You can almost hear Justice Elena Kagan making a deadly serious joke in oral argument, asking some hapless attorney from the solicitor general's office whether she should be calling the order a travel ban, as the president tweeted, or an executive order, as the lawyers have put it.

Of course, the legal briefs that Trump's administration has filed don't call the order a travel ban. And there's a reason for that: A travel ban is at this point really difficult, not to say impossible, to defend in court.

Linguistically, a travel ban sounds a lot like a Muslim ban -- which is what the original ban was popularly called, and what gave rise to multiple courts' conclusion that the order was motivated not by national security but by unconstitutional anti-Muslim prejudice.

The Justice Department strategy, such as it is, has been to minimize the idea that the current executive order is just a direct continuation of the original Trump idea floated during the campaign and tainted by previous statements by the president as well as his adviser Rudy Giuliani, who at one time claimed that Trump had asked him to find a way to make a Muslim ban legal.

Trump's second tweet further devastated the department' strategy by suggesting the direct continuity of the second order with the first. Bizarrely, Trump said that the Department of Justice -- not the White House - "should have stayed with the original travel ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted" to the Supreme Court.

Leave aside the fact that the second executive order came from the White House over Trump's signature, not from the Department of Justice. By saying that it was "submitted" to the Supreme Court he is suggesting that the only point of the second version was to survive judicial review. Calling it politically correct and watered down strongly indicates that he doesn't mean it.

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