Unable to Deport the Coronavirus, Trump Tries a Ban
When President Trump authorized his first travel ban only weeks after his inauguration, he was selective with its targets. The purported goal was to mitigate foreign terrorism, but even if such an action were to work, Trump excluded the nations that produced the 9/11 hijackers. Instead, he targeted seven predominantly Muslim nations that had zero connections to his business interests. Same for the subsequent expansions of the ban, one later that year and another just last month.
Trump’s travel ban remains a nativist placebo, something to assuage those looking to blame someone who isn’t white, Christian, or American for their problems. It has the added benefit, for the president, of distracting from the kind of white supremacist violence that engenders the hatred that his politics require. A travel ban remains among Trump’s Pavlovian responses to crisis because it angers liberals, pleases his rabid base, and accomplishes very little beyond hurting people he couldn’t care less about.
So with the Coronavirus presenting him within arguably the biggest crisis of his presidency, where else did we think he’d turn?
Rather than using his network time Wednesday night to present the American public with a sober plan for mitigation of the coronavirus (COVID-19) or to account for shortcomings in the response thus far, Trump and his advisors defaulted to their xenophobic instincts and added to a discriminatory national legacy. “To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,” he said, without indicating whether or not that period could be extended. “The new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight,” he added before discussing measures aimed at financial relief.
For this familiar bit of xenophobia he turned to his white-nationalist-in-residence: Steven Miller, the anti-immigration absolutist who helped create Trump’s efforts to ban visiting Muslims and collaborated with Jared Kushner to shape the president’s address. It was then unsurprising to see Trump refer suddenly to the United States having “the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” (emphasis mine), and to speak with denigration about China and the European Union, sectors of the world that have been suffering even worse than the United States.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-coronavirus-response-travel-ban-nationalism-966223/