So how do we know the Muslim ban is a Muslim ban? Because President Trump and his allies have told us so.
This is what Trump called for during the campaign:
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump called Monday for barring all Muslims from entering the United States.
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," a campaign press release said.Rudy told us how the administration maneuvered to make the ban legal:
"He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’"
Giuliani said he then put together a commission that included lawmakers and expert lawyers. "And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger," Giuliani said.
"The areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible."Which sounds, frankly, like the kind of work lawyers do to offer an executive the “plausible deniability” he craves.
Still, there’s one more piece of evidence:
The national security adviser's son took to Twitter on Saturday to defend President Donald Trump's controversial refugee order, twice referring to it as a "Muslim ban" and calling it a "necessary" step.
Michael Flynn Jr., who was released from the transition team after spreading a debunked conspiracy theory about a Washington pizza parlor, was formerly a top adviser to his father.
If we've learned anything from our time with Donald Trump, it's to take him literally and seriously. That this is an imperfect Muslim ban doesn't mean it's not a Muslim ban. As Vox.com notes: “The executive order is an evolution of Trump’s actual Muslim ban proposal.” It’s a rose by any other name. We know how that works out.
