Trump’s travel moratorium is a hopeless policy disaster

mately vindicated in the courts (as is likely), that doesn’t change the fact that it makes for lousy policy. It began life as a barstool eruption after the San Bernardino massacre when Donald Trump proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Rudy Giuliani says he was tasked with cleaning up this idea. Hence the executive order suspending entry of citizens from the seven countries while the vetting process is reviewed and tightened.

The core idea makes sense. These are failed, essentially ungovernable states — except for Iran — where reliable data is hard to find. But the moratorium was unnecessary and damaging.

Its only purpose was to fulfill an ill-considered campaign promise.

It caused enormous disruption without making us any safer.

President Trump said he didn’t want to give any warning. Otherwise, he tweeted, “the ‘bad’ would rush into our country. ... A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”

Rush? Not a single American has ever been killed in a terror attack in this country by a citizen from the notorious seven. The killers have come from precisely those countries not listed: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The notion that we had to act immediately because hordes of jihadists in these seven countries were about to board airplanes to blow up Americans is absurd.

Vetting standards could easily have been revised and tightened without the moratorium and its attendant disruptions, stupidities, random cruelties and well-deserved bad press.

During the brief Trump moratorium, a cavalcade of innocent and indeed sympathetic characters — graduate students, separated family members, returning doctors and scientists — were denied entry. You saw this and said to yourself: We are protecting ourselves from these?

If anything, the spectacle served to undermine Trump’s case for extreme vigilance and wariness of foreigners entering the United States. There is already empirical evidence. A Nov. 23 Quinnipiac poll found a 6-point majority in favor of “suspending immigration from ‘terror-prone’ regions;” a Feb. 7 poll found a 6-point majority against.

In the end, what was meant to be a piece of promise-keeping, toughon-terror symbolism has become an oxygen-consuming distraction.

This is a young administration with a transformative agenda to enact. At a time when it should be pushing and promoting deregulation, tax reform and health care transformation, it has steered itself into a pointless culde-sac — where even winning is losing.