You would have a point if any of the "respected and intelligent" conservatives would have been able to actually defend conservatism at all, but they completely failed for decades to stop the long fall into the far left, and Trump is the first to actually be able to get some wins against the left in decades.
Also he had to call it the Muslim Ban for the same reason he has to call it The Wall, it's obvious to anyone with a few brain cells. I really don't understand why exceptional individuals that have been proved wrong time and time again and did nothing but lose all the time keep trying to tell Trump what to do.
It was indeed the smartest idea, any other name and it would have been just an empty campaign point that politicians put in their webpage and no one cares about.
Democrats will never shut up about anything anyways, if they happen to get out of things to complain and whine about they just invent new stuff, and the only thing splitting the Democrats is their indecision between becoming communists or fascists.