So you're saying that the Obama administration set up their list of countries with terrorist activities based on the business interests of somebody who wasn't even running for office yet?
I never said what they're doing was similar. I was merely pointing out that the list of countries they're doing the new, non-similar, horrible things to, was inherited from the previous administration.
Hence your "nations without Trump hotels" comment seemed strange to me.
It's also not very relevant since there's bound to be a strong relation between being relatively stable and prosperous (to say nothing of free, mind) and having trump hotels. I'm no fan of him, but I also don't like "my side" using weak attacks.
The notion that refugees from these seven countries represent a particularly grave threat is nonsense, so we're left to speculate on the real motives. Forty years ago, Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust. Trump still owns properties all over the world. Since he hasn't released his taxes, we have no idea how much money he owes and to whom. It's not at all unreasonable to assume that his decisions will at the very least be affected by his substantial holdings.
Of course it's nonsense, and of course Trump's going to try to help (and avoid harming) his own fortune, and maybe this is even a case of that, it just happens that "discriminating against the same countries been bombing" doesn't require "discriminating against countries that contain Trump properties", so unless we get a leaked memo where he explicitly forbids doing anything to affect travel from those other countries, the conflict of interest case is pretty weak.
Meanwhile, I think the move is motivated by 1) actual interests of people in his cabinet and advisory group (notably Bannon), and 2) populist pandering for re-election. I think that's sufficient motivation. I think the ham-fisted implementation of the policy is either arrogance meeting incompetence or an attempt to anchor expectations so low that Republican elected officials can later happily get on board with him when he's merely being very awful instead of incomprehensibly awful, saying he's "learned". I hope it's the former.
