When President Donald Trump first ran for office, he borrowed from Europe. His maverick Republican primary bid imported wholesale the talking points of the European far right, which at the time was up in arms about a surge of asylum-seeking migrants, primarily from Syria and Afghanistan, landing on the continent. Trump seized on a grisly November 2015 terrorist attack carried out by the Islamic State in Paris as proof of the peril facing the United States. The following month, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the country, a discriminatory ban that shocked the Washington establishment.

It also confounded analysts, given the figurative and literal gulf between the American and European experience of the crisis. Syrian and other refugees resettled in the Unit

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