Legally speaking, the Trump administration has cleaned up its travel ban on visitors from several predominately Muslim countries. Yet like the first ban, struck down by the federal courts for being unconstitutional, this new version signed Monday is still bad policy. But it is bad policy better prepared to survive legal challenges.

It invokes a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya and Sudan. According to the executive order, this is necessary to buy the administration time to improve security procedures involving those countries.

Unlike the first order President Trump signed on Jan. 27, the ban exempts current visa holders. This change could make it difficult for states to again establish legal standing. Last time state attorneys general contended their state economies would suffer damage if federal authorities blocked employees, educators and others who held visas from returning from overseas’ visits.

Also absent is language from travel ban 1.0 that provided for special treatment for visitors from persecuted minority groups, which essentially meant non-Muslims. That provision, now absent, had led to the legal argument that the order amounted to an unconstitutional religious test.

And while the first executive order included an open-ended ban on accepting refugees seeking to escape the catastrophic civil war in Syria — a provision the administration’s lawyers had trouble defending — the new order contains a fixed 120-day freeze, followed by a review.

Language in the executive order defines the motivation and alleged need for a ban, pointing to conflicts and unrest and terrorist activities in those nations. It contends that the risk of “permitting entry of a national of one of these countries who intends to commit terrorist acts or otherwise harm the national security of the United States is unacceptably high.” The lack of reasoning behind banning visitors from those particular countries was another weakness of the prior order.

While it carries no legal implications, getting Iraq off the list certainly makes foreign policy sense. Telling a country allied with the United States in the fight against the Islamic State that its citizens were not welcomed, under any circumstances, seemed a particularly wrongheaded move in a poorly thought out order number one.

So the Trump administration may have put sufficient lipstick on this pig to survive what is likely to be new legal challenges.

But it’s still a pig.

It's a pig because it is likely to make the nation, along with the soldiers and intelligence officers still operating in Muslim countries, less safe. The ban feeds into the narrative of Islamic terrorist organizations that the United State and the West are not at war with terrorists, but with Islam. The greater that perception, the more these groups are able to gain recruits. The ban will make it more difficult for intelligence officers to gain the trust of Muslims in these foreign lands, hindering the fight against terrorist networks.

It’s a pig because the time and work spent on developing and legally defending the needless executive order — not once but twice — could have been spent on making the improvements to vetting and security that the Trump administration claims are necessary. Unfortunately, quietly working to upgrade security measures would not have given Trump the chance to fulfill his Muslim ban/extreme vetting campaign promises.

It’s a pig because it appeals to our worst nature, feeding divisions in our own country and going against our ideals. The refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict are victims, not perpetrators, mostly women and children escaping horrid conditions in resettlement camps. The vetting they receive is already extensive, making Trump’s fear mongering baseless.

Yet this is what Trump vowed to do on the campaign trail, give him that. It was a vow that adoring crowds greeted with loud applause. Assuming the courts do not stand in the way this time, the red hatters have their ban. The nation, however, is lesser for it.