The Trump team's asinine ban of legal travelers and refugees from Muslim nations was the result of a campaign promise to his overtly racist base. But we should also take yet another moment to, just for the future records, once again point out that it will do absolutely nothing to "protect" the nation from terrorists. It will likely get refugees killed, and is causing agents to refuse entry to students, scientists, and those that assisted U.S. war efforts in the region and are now in danger for having done so, and in unleashing a wave of deserved anger over each individual betrayal it is likely to do more to increase extremism against the United States than prevent it.
[S]ince the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, no one has been killed in the United States in a terrorist attack by anyone who emigrated from or whose parents emigrated from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, the seven countries targeted in the order’s 120-day visa ban, according to Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina. [...]“In my opinion, this is just a huge mistake in terms of counterterrorism cooperation,” said Daniel Benjamin, formerly the State Department’s top counterterrorism official and now a scholar at Dartmouth. “For the life of me, I don’t see why we would want to alienate the Iraqis when they are the ground force against ISIS.” [...]
“It sends an unmistakable message to the American Muslim community that they are facing discrimination and isolation,” Mr. Benjamin said. That, he said, will “feed the jihadist narrative” that the United States is at war with Islam, potentially encouraging a few more Muslims to plot violence.
It was the policy of even the feckless George W. Bush administration to forever repeat that America was not "at war with" or hostile towards the Muslim religion. The Trump team, culled from the ranks of the paranoid and the incompetent, just broadcast to the entire world that such assurances were meaningless. We will be less safe tomorrow than we were last week, all in service to Donald Trump flattering the white supremacists in his ranks at the expense of our experts, our military, our laws, and basic decency. He understands none of it, and is a puppet to his own whims.