Second, Trump’s executive order will make it more difficult for the United States to find locals to work with in affected foreign countries—cooperation that America needs if it’s going to defeat ISIS or prevent attacks by ISIS or al-Qaeda. As former CIA Director Michael Hayden put it in the Washington Post, “In the Middle East, with its honor-based cultures, it’s easier to recruit someone we have been shooting at than it is to recruit someone whose society has been insulted.” Fallout can already be seen in Iraq, where pro-American forces have been undermined.

Third, Trump’s order relied on political advisers like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller while bypassing many expert federal employees who could have anticipated weaknesses in the policy and greatly improved on it. As Ben Wittes put it, “in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process.”

Fourth, while Trump’s order won’t magically make ordinary Muslims into jihadists, it will make them “more likely to see the U.S. government as hostile and worry that any cooperation or interaction with law enforcement could make them targets of harassment or worse. Successful counterterrorism depends on community support, and the Executive Order drives communities away from government.”

Those are some of the ways that Trump’s order makes the United States less safe. Surveying his performance to his point, there are many other reasons for concern, too. Trump ran the most inept transition into the White House in memory, skipping many of the daily intelligence briefings offered to him and failing to fill dozens of key positions. He is needlessly alienating U.S. allies like Australia and Mexico. He appears ignorant of what exactly the “One China” policy entails and has nevertheless courted conflict with Beijing over it in a break with decades of bipartisan consensus. He elevated Steve Bannon, a highly ideological political adviser with a hankering for right-wing nationalism, to the National Security Council with an executive order that, according to the New York Times, he didn’t read before signing.

And that, too, is only a partial reckoning.

A subset of Trump’s supporters insisted that he should be taken seriously, not literally—that his tough rhetoric on immigration and national security was meant to signal his seriousness about those issues, not that he literally believed his own rhetoric. So far, however, it appears as though Trump should have been taken literally: various courses that he has pursued suggest that he has little grasp of key facts. And whatever his intentions, his unserious actions are unlikely to improve anything so much as the approval of the part of his base that is most interested in red meat.