After Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, many Americans swooned at the fact that our president could read words. For a moment, it really was shocking. Trump, who usually sounds like the Facebook account of your old high-school tormentor, barely mentioned himself in the speech. He seemed to look forward more than backward. And he was wearing a tailored suit. Who was this man?

But it didn’t take long for the shock and awe to wear off. A new president, alas, had not been born. Mere days and tweets later, Trump was again the same misdirecting, power-abusing, narcissistic chief of state that he is. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

There’s a lesson here for how we should view Trump’s re-released Muslim ban. The administration will tell you that this time the executive order is specifically tailored and carefully crafted to protect the nation and pass legal scrutiny. But we won’t be fooled. In substance, we’ve been given the same Muslim ban as the first time around. It’s just that, like Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress, it’s being delivered in complete sentences.

Yet make no mistake. This ban is just as prejudiced as its predecessor and demands as much – if not more – opposition.

The differences between the two travel bans are minimal. Iraq has been removed from the list of countries whose citizens cannot enter the United States for at least 90 days, beginning this time on 16 March. But citizens of the other six countries – Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya (and maybe more later) – remain barred from entry.

Both executive orders have presented themselves as temporary measures yet, as April approaches, we shouldn’t forget that temporary government actions such as levying income tax have an almost magical propensity to turn into permanent fixtures.

The new executive order also explicitly allows green card holders and dual nationals entry to the US. This is meant to get around the multiple legal objections raised with the implementation of the first Muslim ban. Syrian refugees are no longer indefinitely prevented entry, but general refugee intake is again halted for 120 days. Language from the first executive order that prioritized refugee claimants from “minority religions” has also been removed. Other changes in the new order permit the United States to live up to its basic international treaty obligations.

But none of these adjustments alters the Muslim ban’s fundamental flaws.

First – and this can’t be emphasized enough – Trump’s own people have found no rational security justification for this ban. A leaked Department of Homeland Security memo, prepared after the first travel ban, found that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity”.

And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow obtained a March 1 Homeland Security report which assessed that “most foreign-born US-based violent extremists [are] likely radicalized several years after their entry into the United States”. If the executive order is not rational, then maybe – just maybe – it’s bigoted?

Second, these Muslim bans are presented to us as if we’ve never heard Donald Trump, Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller speak. Probably the most disingenuous element of this administration is how it uses broadcast and social media to get its message across while disassociating itself from its own media presence.

But we remember when they talk about banning Muslims. We make the connections between banning Muslims, demonizing immigrants and building walls on borders. We can read the paranoid white nationalist ramblings on Breitbart News and see all of these actions for what they are: a blatant attempt to keep America as white as possible and as Christian as possible for as long as possible.

But you can’t run a country in the modern world with these kinds of ideas and these kinds of borders. If the US really wants to wall itself off from the world, then Mexico and Canada ought to build a bridge over the United States, and get America to pay for it.

Third, and most important, we must recognize how Trump’s Muslim ban is an extreme deviation from more than 50 years of US immigration policy. Prior to 1965, the US had favored northern Europeans in matters of immigration, but in the middle of the Civil Rights movement and the Cold War, that system was widely seen, here and abroad, as racist and antiquated.

Change was needed, and a new law in 1965 reformed the basis for admission to the United States. What mattered was not your country of origin but what needed skills or family connections to the US you had. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island, he stated that the law “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation”.

With the old immigration, “families were kept apart because a husband or a wife or a child had been born in the wrong place,” and an immigration system based on where you were born instead of who you are “violated the basic principle of American democracy”.

“Today,” Johnson spoke on 3 October 1965, “with my signature, this system is abolished. We can now believe that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”

Johnson was wrong. It only took until 2017 for the old prejudice to once again become law.

This is why the fight against Trump’s Muslim ban is crucial. It’s the fight for the soul of the United States. The first time around, the people pushed this repulsive executive order to the threshold. Now it’s time to push it out the door.