The changes have come so fast that it’s worth sitting for a minute on the fact that had someone in 2012 told the GOP that they would all be lining up behind this in 2016, it would have been considered outrageous slander.

In the most generous interpretation, then, tens of millions of people have cynically thrown their support to a person and to ideas they considered monstrous only a year ago. They have become monsters, by their own definitions, in the service of an openly racist president.

Americanness is obviously highly contested and always has been, but the open, cosmopolitan definition isn’t just the one that seems morally correct, it’s the one that matches my lived experience—very little of my life would be recognizable (or, going not so far back in time, possible on this continent at all) if you cut out all my friends and acquaintances who were not born in this country.

Nor is it at all lost on me—as this policy is announced on a day set aside for remembering the Holocaust—that when people start making lists of the religions that make lives less valuable, they rarely stop at one.

To everyone whose life has been thrown into chaos by this, and to the Muslims whose very lives are insulted by this bigotry, I’m so sorry, and so angry.