The first time President Donald Trump tried to institute a travel ban to prevent large numbers of immigrants and visitors from reaching the United States, back in 2017, massive protests erupted at major airports across the country. This time, at least so far, there has been nothing of the sort. The disparity in reactions helps illustrate how habituated Americans have become to a president who wields his power with discriminatory intentions.Last night, Trump announced he was barring travelers from Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, the Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. The administration is also imposing partial restrictions, which will prevent people from coming to the U.S. to immigrate or study but will allow tourist travel, on people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.The administration says it implemented the ban in order to prevent future terror attacks in the aftermath of Sunday’s anti-Semitic terrorist attack on a rally in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza. “The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas. We don’t want them,” Trump said in a video announcing the new ban.The alleged attacker is an Egyptian national who overstayed his visa. Egypt, however, is not on the travel-ban list, ostensibly because Egypt and the U.S. cooperate closely on security matters, as Trump hinted yesterday. In other words, the alleged perpetrator’s home country was not targeted in a travel ban that was supposedly instituted to protect American Jews from anti-Semitic violence. Of course, not even a more aggressive ban could totally protect Jews from such violence, especially not when the president himself has a history of inspiring it.[Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire: Trump tries to blame the Colorado attack on ‘open border’ policies]The administration did offer another, more credible, explanation for the travel ban: that it is targeting countries that do not properly vet travelers and that have a high percentage of visa overstayers—as in the case of the suspect in the Colorado attack. But that explanation hints at another motive: With this new travel ban, the Trump administration is furthering a demographic-engineering project intended to exclude immigrants whom the president finds undesirable because of their ethno-religious backgrounds. Trump has referred to Latin American and African nations as “shithole countries,” while pining for immigration from places such as Norway. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump said that immigrants have brought “bad genes” into the country. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, whom other Trump officials treat with deference, has promoted the idea that America was ruined when, in the 1960s, it removed racist immigration restrictions that had partially inspired the Nazis.An obvious explanation for these countries having many visa overstayers is that many of these nations are in the midst of conflicts or are run by governments with horrible human-rights records. As Mark Hetfield, the president of the refugee-resettlement group HIAS, told The Washington Post, “Those are exactly the kinds of countries that produce the refugees and, in particular, produce refugees that the United States would have an interest in resettling.” The logic of the travel ban is such that actual refugees from persecution around the world won’t count as refugees in the eyes of the U.S. government, because of the actions of the very governments persecuting them in the first place.Furthermore, the idea that these governments are not to be trusted seems entirely arbitrary. After all, Trump has made only one exception to his blanket stop to the U.S. refugee program: the white South Africans he has accepted as “refugees” from a campaign of “genocide” by the South African government. If, as Trump has claimed, the South African government is “genocidal,” how can his administration consider its security screening accurate? And if it doesn’t consider it trustworthy, why is it accepting white refugees only from that country while other refugees are barred because of their government’s shortcomings? The simple answer is that these white refugees are the closest thing to immigrants “from Norway” Trump can find. Those fleeing actual persecution from the nations targeted are not white enough to meet the criteria for Trump’s sympathy and therefore be granted refuge in the United States.Less than a decade ago, Trump’s sweeping ban would have sparked an outcry. But in the intervening years, the Supreme Court has given this discriminatory approach its blessing, and Trump won reelection with a plurality of the vote. The number of disastrous things the administration is doing makes prioritizing difficult for its opponents. But there is also the reality that Trumpism is a kind of authoritarian autoimmune disease, one that has been ravaging the American body politic for so long that there are fewer small-d democratic antibodies left to fight it off.