A Trump travel ban we’ve seen before

The central question to ask about President Trump’s latest travel ban, which he issued on Sunday, is: Will it make Americans safer?

The answer, as best as anyone can tell based on publicly available information, is no.

Starting Oct. 18, the United States will permanently bar entry to most citizens of seven countries — Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea. Certain citizens from Iraq and Venezuela will face restrictions and heightened scrutiny.

Mr. Trump justified these restrictions — which target countries that either failed or refused to meet new vetting standards — by saying he was acting “to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people.” Americans should be skeptical. While it may appear more modulated, Sunday’s proclamation is a direct descendant of a central plank of Mr. Trump’s campaign — his call for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, which he made in 2015, and which remained on his campaign website as late as May.

The list is almost identical to the ban issued in January — all are Muslim-majority countries with the exception of two additions, North Korea and Venezuela, both of which look a lot like window dressing. Annual visa grants to North Koreans number in the dozens, while the ban in Venezuela applies only to officials from the government of the Trump nemesis Nicolás Maduro, along with their family members.

Meanwhile, no citizen from the barred countries has carried out a fatal terrorist attack in the United States in the past two decades. That’s in part because the “extreme vetting” that Mr. Trump and his anti-immigration cabal have been hawking was already the law of the land. The United States subjects visa applicants to some of the most thorough and rigorous scrutiny in the world. The risk of a terrorist attack by a foreign-born visitor who could be stopped by these procedures is minuscule.

As one federal appeals court said in blocking the earlier ban, the administration has presented no evidence that “present vetting standards are inadequate, and no finding that absent the improved vetting procedures there likely will be harm to our national interests.”

The new restrictions have, we’re told, been informed by rational, evidence-based concerns about countries whose vetting procedures pose a true security threat to the United States. That might be enough for the ban to be upheld by the federal courts, which are as a rule very deferential to presidential actions on immigration and national security. (On Monday, the Supreme Court, which was slated to hear challenges to the second ban on Oct. 10, removed the case from its calendar and ordered the parties to submit briefs on whether the new ban makes the case moot.) But considered in the broader context of Mr. Trump’s own remarks — most recently, his call for a “far larger, tougher and more specific” travel ban — it’s hard to see how this latest version breaks much new ground.

This shows why it is so damaging to have a fundamentally untrustworthy commander in chief. All presidents must make hard choices about security, and all administrations have faced the intransigence or incompetence of foreign governments when it comes to fighting terrorism. But when the president has freely spouted his own longstanding animus toward adherents of one of the world’s major religions, his actions — which include, in addition to the travel ban, a pervasive hostility toward immigration — must be evaluated against that backdrop.

In the end, debating whether Sunday’s travel ban is fairer or better thought out than its predecessors is beside the point. Its political function is the same — the latest gambit in a cynical, unceasing effort by an embattled president to inflame public fears and woo the xenophobes in his base.