These are fundamentals that have been successfully applied by nations against foreign terrorists, literally for centuries. With Trump and his disturbed but enormously influential chief adviser Steve Bannon devising counter-terror policy, however, the odds of a foreign terror attack on American soil have already increased exponentially:

In composing and implementing its executive order “Protecting the Nation From Terrorist Entry into the United States,” Donald Trump’s White House has shown a disregard for — or ignorance of — these precepts that is breathtaking.

What Trump has done in a week has provided more solace and encouragement to foreign terrorists than in all of the prior eight years combined. Trump has, in short order:

1. Made the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims uncertain about the global superpower’s fundamental orientation toward them and their faith. This is a dramatic shift after successive Republican and Democratic administrations drew a clear line between a small group of extremists and ordinary believers. 2. Prompted the parliament of Iraq — our partner, whose army is the primary ground force fighting ISIS — to approve a reciprocal ban on Americans coming to Iraq and put Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in an impossible position. 3. Given ISIS propagandists a windfall to work with — which they are exulting about — just at the moment that the group is reeling from a series of major setbacks. 4. Profoundly unsettled patriotic American Muslims — who provide as many as 40% of the tips that domestic counterterrorism authorities receive — and undercut their efforts to work with U.S. law enforcement to prevent radicalization.

On top of the bumbling and chaos in implementing the poorly drafted executive order, the administration has already telegraphed its incompetence in this week’s failed attack on al Qaeda, which killed an untold number of innocent civilians and a Navy SEAL, and resulted in the loss of one of our aircraft. That incompetence has now riveted the world and has not gone unnoticed by our enemies.

It’s almost—well, not really almost—as if Bannon, the policy’s undisputed architect, wants a terror attack on American citizens, in order to justify whatever Final Solution he has in mind for anyone who doesn’t fit his white supremacist profile. Because the executive order he wrote for Trump really has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, but is grounded in pure, unadulterated racism:

The executive order aims to reap more than fodder for foreign terrorists than eight years of a quick political bonus, though. It seeks to fuse the fears of jihadism with anxieties over America’s demographic trajectory. The Trump White House wants us all to believe that our security interests require both reversing the “browning” of America and curbing the influx of foreigners who will make white Americans a minority in the nation by 2050. Woven in this is a view of Islam as an unalterably hostile force — a perspective so ungrounded in history and theology that it mirrors the jihadi view of the U.S. and the West. Trump and Bannon are not promoting American security so much as fear and racism.

Bannon’s elevation to a post on Trump’s National Security Council reveals an administration more concerned about ideology than pragmatic expertise in dealing with actual terrorists and preventing their attacks on American soil. Benjamin points out that under the Obama administration’s already extreme vetting process for immigrants, we know far more about, for example, any given Syrian refugee than we know about Donald Trump or Steven Bannon:

Since 9/11, not a single death has been caused by terrorists from the seven countries singled out the executive order — or anywhere else — entering the U.S. to carry out an attack. To get into the U.S., a visa applicant must be screened multiple times, including being checked against terabytes of intelligence and law-enforcement materials, biometric data and the like.

This is why President Obama declined to use the phrase “Islamic Terrorism”—because it taints the vast majority of a billion Muslim people as “terrorists” and works against our interest in countering actual terrorism. Because the vast, vast majority of Muslims are ordinary, non-threatening hard-working people, having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, and are only interested in making a better life for themselves and their families. As the reaction of Silicon Valley and other corporations to Trump’s executive order has shown, they also contribute mightily to the U.S. economy.

In spite of this, the lies from this administration keep coming, pouring out in a fusillade of bizarre, hateful, and wholly erroneous propaganda designed solely to stoke fear, not combat terrorism:

Throughout the campaign, Trump told Americans that our immigration system was failing to keep dangerous people out. On top of that falsehood, he has now piled another: The executive order, he says is “is not a Muslim ban… This is not about religion. This is about terror and keeping our country safe." Nonsense.

Benjamin acknowledges it’s been hard for people in the intelligence community to get used to the idea of a president so deliberately ignorant about the history of the people that he’s clumsily targeted, that he could appoint someone as inexperienced as Bannon to devise his counterterrorism policies:

Some will find this far-fetched. Perhaps it is. Some will find this far-fetched. Perhaps it is. But making sense of a purported counterterrorism innovation that diminishes our security is no small challenge. Dealing with a cabal of conspiracy theorists requires us to master their dark arts and twisted thinking.

But Americans are now faced with much more than simply “mastering the dark arts and twisted thinking” behind Trump’s untested “innovation” in fighting terror. Some of us—perhaps many of us-- are going to be killed because of this Administration’s incompetence and deliberate disregard.

The only question is when.