Administration expands the travel ban to cover thirty-nine countries; nineteen face full entry suspension and twenty face partial restrictions.

OK. Tuesday afternoon. The President signed a proclamation, titled in the formal way these things are titled, titled, I am quoting, Restricting and Limiting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the Security of the United States. That is the title. That is the long version. The short version, in plain English, is travel ban two-point-oh. Or three. I have lost count.

The list. Buddy. Sit down for the list. Nineteen countries get the full ban. Twenty more get partial restrictions. Total is thirty-nine countries plus persons holding Palestinian Authority travel documents.

The full-ban list. Read it. Afghanistan. Burkina Faso. Myanmar. Chad. The Republic of the Congo. Equatorial Guinea. Eritrea. Haiti. Iran. Laos. Libya. Mali. Niger. Sierra Leone. Somalia. South Sudan. Sudan. Syria. Yemen. Plus Palestinian Authority documents.

The partial list. Also read it. Angola. Antigua and Barbuda. Benin. Burundi. Côte d’Ivoire. Cuba. Dominica. Gabon. The Gambia. Malawi. Mauritania. Nigeria. Senegal. Tanzania. Togo. Tonga. Turkmenistan. Venezuela. Zambia. Zimbabwe.

Tonga. Buddy. I had to look up Tonga. Tonga is a Pacific island. Population: 105,000. It is a kingdom. Run by a king. Tonga has, on the State Department’s own visa data, a visa overstay rate of approximately one-tenth of one percent. Antigua and Barbuda has forty-five thousand people. Antigua and Barbuda’s largest export is Eric Clapton’s recording studio. I am not making that up. Eric Clapton owns a studio there.

The partial restrictions, by the press release, include Côte d’Ivoire, which is a democracy. Include Senegal, which is a democracy. Include Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa. Include Cuba, which we already had a separate set of restrictions on going back to the 1960s.

Buddy. The list is not a list of threats. The list is a list of countries the State Department, in this round, was given fifteen minutes to nominate. Some of them, sure, are countries we have ongoing security concerns with. Some of them are Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua and Barbuda, for the record, has no army. They have a coast guard. The coast guard has six boats. I checked.

The proclamation takes effect January first. The State Department’s consular operations, by Wednesday morning, were drafting cancellation cables for thousands of pending visas. The cancellation cables include, by reporting, the graduate students, the medical residents, the traveling musicians, and the small-business owners who had paid the visa fee, completed the medical, sat for the interview, and were waiting on the printer.

I am arguing with the television. The television is, on Wednesday morning, in Tonga, trying to figure out what they did.