I'm a bit uncertain, here, but just to take a swing at it: If I say, "This isn't actually the ‘Muslim ban’", does it help clarify if I add explicitly that the real Muslim ban is still yet to come?
As with myriad similar frameworks, to what degree does our attendance of the most obvious sleights reinforce perceptions of their argumentative propriety or, at the very least, viability? And no, I don't have either a good answer to the question itself or solution to the larger problem it describes. Still, though, there are in the American context a lot of legal particulars going into what President Trump is attempting, and if we get too hung up on the idea of a "Muslim ban", the next round is going to clobber our gobs. Yes, we can all see what it is and what is coming. But insofar as Mr. Trump is willing to tell us this isn't the Muslim ban, I am willing to believe him because the only thing it can possibly mean is that the real, full-spectrum, full-force Muslim ban is yet to come.
Toward that, think of it this way: He has some architects in place to construct an argumentative framework that bears the same sort of fault we see elsewhere in the conservative spectrum, like that one #NeverTrump potential candidate, French, who was the head of an organization that harassed universities for not hiring enough revisionist historians, and other such notions. That is to say, the Trump administration shares this particular fault with their intraparty opposition; it's nearly stock issue among movement-oriented conservatives.
I can't wait to see what they come up with, a great white whale-ish, hope-ish sack of excrement so synthetic and complicated and fragmented all those jagged edges must have really, really hurt to pass.
