President Donald Trump offered his most serious address to the nation yet on the coronavirus outbreak Wednesday night, as he delivered a televised speech from the Oval Office. Declaring that his administration was “marshalling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people,” Trump announced plans to respond to the crisis “with great speed and professionalism.” And, unsurprisingly for a president obsessed with his border wall, the president had one clear solution: banning Europeans from entering the United States.
Touting the “early, intense action” that his administration took through travel bans to the U.S. from China—while ignoring obvious flaws with the government’s early response when it came to diagnostic testing and allocating resources—Trump announced Wednesday that his administration is responding to the “foreign virus” by banning travel from Europe to the U.S. for 30 days as of Friday at midnight. The ban will exclude the United Kingdom, despite the fact the country has more than 450 cases of coronavirus, far more than many of the European nations that will be barred under the ban. (The president has also not banned travel from South Korea, which has so far had a much higher rate of coronavirus cases than any European country outside of Italy.) The ban comes after the president raised concerns about Europe during a Wednesday meeting with banking executives, the Wall Street Journal reports, saying the continent was a coronavirus “hotbed” and blaming its spread on “the ease with which travelers can cross borders into other countries.”
The president also announced several economic efforts in response to the virus during his Oval Office address, including instructing the Small Business Administration to provide low-interest loans to affected businesses, and advocating for policies that would defer tax payments for affected businesses and offer immediate payroll tax relief. Trump continued to downplay the virus itself, however, saying that for “the vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low,” though the elderly have a much more serious risk of complications or death. (The president, of course, is himself an older adult at risk of serious complications, and has recently spent time with multiple people who have been exposed to or are suspected to have the virus.)
While the president focused on efforts to keep more people from bringing the coronavirus to the U.S. from abroad, he largely ignored any discussion of efforts to contain the Covid-19 cases that are already rapidly spreading throughout the country. Trump pushed common-sense measures that individuals and groups can take, like social distancing and practicing good hygiene. But he declined to mention any efforts that would address key issues facing the U.S. as the virus spreads, like increasing coronavirus testing or taking action to combat the looming possibility that there may be more Americans who require hospitalization than hospitals can actually handle.
Trump’s Oval Office speech comes as the president has reportedly taken a more serious view of the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on the economy in recent days, after weeks of minimizing the global pandemic. CNN reported before the president’s address that Trump told his economy team Monday that he “want[ed] to do something big” in response to the economic fallout from the outbreak, which has sent the stock market reeling. Sources described a “distinct shift in Trump’s demeanor and approach to the coronavirus pandemic over the past 48 hours” to CNN, after Mar-a-Lago club members warned the president over the weekend that “his response to the virus was being viewed as inadequate.” Upon his return to Washington, one senior White House official told CNN, “The gravity of the moment was pretty clear.” The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Trump’s mounting anxiety over the potential economic effects of the coronavirus also resulted in the president having an “explosive tirade” over Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, urging Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to pressure the Fed chief to “take more dramatic steps to arrest the stock market’s plummet.” (Trump also took aim at Powell himself, a frequent target of the president’s ire, in his tirade, saying “Powell never should have been appointed and is damaging the nation and his presidency.”)