President Trump's approach to terrorism and immigration is backfiring.

MAX BOOT, DAILY NEWS

On Monday, according to police, a 27-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh named Akayed Ullah detonated an explosive device at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, seriously injuring no one but himself.

Within hours, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was claiming: “This attack underscores the need for Congress to work with the president on immigration reforms that enhance the national security and public safety. We must protect our borders and we must ensure that individuals entering our country are not coming to do harm to people, and we must move to a merit-based immigration system.”

It’s true that Ullah was born abroad, but it’s hard to see what his attack has to do with immigration reform, and specifically Trump’s version thereof — any more than did the Halloween car-ramming attack in downtown New York carried out by Uzbekistan native Sayfullo Saipov.

There is no evidence that either Ullah or Saipov was an Islamist radical when they came here years ago; if they had been, it’s hard to imagine why they waited so long to strike and, in Ullah’s case, did so in such failed fashion. Neither of their attacks required much planning or preparation, and both were inspired by Islamic State’s online propaganda. Like the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, they were radicalized while living in the United States.

In short, it’s hard to see how tougher immigration screening would have helped, unless the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who admitted them were clairvoyant and could foresee that they would become drawn, years into the future, toward radical Islamist ideology.

Certainly the various forms of Trump’s Muslim ban would not have prevented these terrorists’ entry into America. Neither Bangladesh nor Uzbekistan nor Kyrgyzstan — the place where the Tsarnaev brothers were born of Chechen ancestry — were included on Trump’s list of forbidden countries. The original executive order, issued Jan. 27, affected Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, even though terrorists from those countries have never actually killed anyone in the United States.

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Whatever form it takes, the travel ban is utterly disconnected from, indeed at odds with, the requirements of counter-terrorism. What the Port Authority attack underscores is that the No. 1 terrorist threat to the homeland comes from people who are radicalized while already living here — whether they are white supremacists or Islamists. Perversely, Trump’s rhetoric — tolerant of white supremacism, intolerant of Islam — helps both groups of extremists.

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Instead of blustering on about the problems of immigration and Islam, the president would be better advised to acknowledge that America’s biggest success story is our ability to assimilate immigrants from all over the world.

The New York Police Department exemplifies that diversity — its officers hail from 88 different countries, and Muslim officers and analysts are essential to monitoring Muslim terrorist networks. Yet Trump always speaks of the problems, never the promise, of immigration. Rather than falsely claiming vindication from every terrorist attack, the President would be well advised to rethink his entire approach.