Trump’s coronavirus ban on travel from the EU is
backfiring already
Jonathan
Freedland
A live
televised address from the Oval Office should have reassured the US. Instead it
sowed chaos
@Freedland
Thu 12 Mar
2020 13.21 GMTLast modified on Thu 12 Mar 2020 19.10 GMT
Such is the reverse Midas touch of Donald Trump, that
his attempt last night to face facts, steady nerves and reassure the public
succeeded in spreading panic, sowing confusion and ratcheting up the anxiety.
The fact
that Trump delivered a rare, live televised address to the nation should, by
itself, have induced calm. It suggested that the president was moving out of
fantasyland, abandoning the denial that had led him to promise a miracle was on
the way and that the threat of coronavirus was likely to recede as soon as next
month, when the weather got warmer. (As recently as Tuesday, he was saying, “It
will go away, just stay calm.”) That he was ready to deploy one of the US
presidency’s most powerful tools, usually reserved for moments of war or
disaster – a TV address from the Oval Office – seemed to signal that he was, at
last, facing reality.
Sure
enough, when he referred to the virus as a “horrible infection”, after weeks
spent dismissing it as a glorified cold or flu, it fed the hope that Trump
might finally be ready to acknowledge that his approach up until this moment
had not worked – that this was not a problem that could be dealt with in the
usual away, swatted aside with a tweet or by hanging a comic nickname around
the neck of one of his enemies.
But no
sooner had that hope appeared than it faded away. For in the course of nine
minutes, Trump swiftly reverted to type. He described Covid-19 as a “foreign
virus”, and took pains to point out that “a large number of new clusters in the
United States were seeded by travellers from Europe”. His doctrine of “America
first” – a phrase he used once again – forever pits the US against the world,
with its implication that America’s purity is permanently under threat of
contamination by alien hordes. Trump has used that imagery in the context of
immigration for more than four years; it should hardly be a surprise that he
uses it now in the context of disease.
Equally in
character was his preference for the vast, sweeping edict over the detailed,
calibrated policy response. What the US needs most is a serious, extensive
programme of testing. Currently, the US is bottom of the global league table
for coronavirus testing, at a rate of just five people in every million. (South
Korea is testing 3,692 people per million.) But that kind of announcement would
require too much work, not least because Trump shut down the dedicated
Obama-era, White House unit that had focused on preparedness against a global
pandemic. It would be too dull and plodding for the man who made his name
issuing orders on The Apprentice. Trump prefers the kingly diktat that makes
instant headlines and good TV. In the 2016 campaign it was his call for a
“total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the US. This time it was a
ban on travellers from 26 European countries in the Schengen area, starting on
Friday. Once again, the would-be medieval monarch was ordering the drawbridge
pulled up against the foreign menace.
He surely
hoped his subjects would be soothed by such a decisive show of leadership. But
because this is Trump, his short speech was riddled with errors that had to be
rapidly corrected – thereby spreading confusion rather than clarity. One
example: he announced that his Europe ban would “apply to the tremendous amount
of trade and cargo” across the Atlantic, prompting the White House to rush out
a statement explaining that the president had got it wrong, and that the new
policy would, in fact, only apply to people, not goods. If the plan was to
project a White House coolly capable in the face of a crisis, that mix-up and
Trump’s halting discomfort in front of the teleprompter conveyed the precise
opposite.
Above all,
the new policy lacked rhyme or reason. Why keep out almost all Europeans, as if
this problem is exclusive to Europe (and China), rather than global, and when
the US has a rising infection problem all its own? And why exempt the UK, which
is hardly coronavirus-free? There was no explanation, so speculation filled the
vacuum. Could it be a politically motivated swipe at the EU, which Trump once
said he regarded as the US’s greatest “foe”, pointedly giving preferential
treatment to Brexit Britain? Was it driven by a motive as base as the fact that
Trump has golf courses in the UK (and Ireland), and he didn’t want to harm his
own businesses? Or did it spring from a crudely racist worldview that divides
the globe into a clean, acceptable Anglosphere set against a tainted, diseased
“abroad”?
Whatever
the explanation, the address did not work. The clearest proof came in the
metric Trump understands best and that terrifies him most, because he believes
it holds the key to his prospects of re-election. The headline this morning:
“Stock markets tumble as Trump’s Europe travel ban shocks investors”. Truly, he
is Midas in reverse.
• Jonathan
Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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