Trump Mistakenly Announces Ban on All Travel and Imports From Europe, Then
Backtracks
By Robert Mackey, The Intercept
12 March 20
Lashing out at Europe for the spread of the “foreign” coronavirus to the United
States, President Donald Trump told the American people on Wednesday he would
halt all travel and imports from the continent. Within minutes, White House
officials scrambled to correct him, explaining that the 30-day ban would only
apply to some foreigners traveling from some European countries and not at all
to goods.
The confusion had started during the address, when Trump said that the ban on
“all travel from Europe” was necessary “to keep new cases from entering our
shores,” but would not include the United Kingdom, where coronavirus has spread
widely enough to have infected at least 459 people, including the country’s
health minister.
The White House
✔
@WhiteHouse
We will be suspending all travel from Europe, except the United Kingdom, for
the next 30 days. The policy goes into effect Friday at midnight.
Embedded video
22.8K
21:40 - 11 Mar 2020
Twitter Ads information and privacy
9,896 people are talking about this
The backtracking began almost as soon as the president had finished speaking.
As aides told reporters there was no ban on goods or cargo, the acting Homeland
Security secretary tweeted that the travel ban was not Europe-wide. It would
only apply to foreign citizens coming from one of the 26 European nations that
make up the Schengen Area, a region in which travelers can cross borders
without passports. While most European Union nations are in Schengen, five are
not: Ireland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus. The ban will also not
apply to European countries that are not in the E.U., including Russia and
Ukraine.
Since the U.K. never joined the Schengen area, but still permits visa-free
travel from all of those nations, enforcing the new ban will not be easy.
While excluding the U.K. from the ban appears to make no epidemiological sense
— and the whole policy of travel restriction seems misguided, now that the
virus is already spreading inside the United States — Trump might see the
measure as a way to punish the European Union, the multinational bloc he
encouraged the U.K. to withdraw from this year.
Trump detests the E.U. as an economic competitor and seems personally affronted
by the way its leaders foster a pan-European identity as a counterweight to the
ethnic nationalism he prefers.
“The European Union is a group of countries that got together to screw the
United States — it’s as simple as that,” Trump said at a private dinner
recorded by Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine fixer in 2018. “They’re worse than China in
the sense of barriers; we lose 151 billion with them,” he added. “The European
Union is really bad,” the president told the all-white group of donors. “You
know it doesn’t sound like it, you know, the European Union, we’re all sort of
from there, right?”
In his speech, Trump boasted that his decision to restrict travel from China
had slowed the spread of the coronavirus to the U.S. and claimed that European
nations had higher levels of infection now because “The European Union failed
to take the same precautions.” In fact, the virus might have reached Europe
first simply because it is on the same landmass as China, and the extent of
infection in the U.S. remains unknown, since a far smaller number of people
have been tested for the disease.
Without citing evidence, Trump also claimed that a ban was justified because “a
large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from
Europe.”
A proclamation posted on the White House website Wednesday night also listed a
wide range of exceptions for Europeans who might be exempt from the ban, and
made clear that it does not apply to American citizens or permanent residents.
Trump’s address focused so much on the new travel restrictions that he
mentioned only in passing the measures that have helped to slow the spread of
the virus in places like South Korea and Hong Kong — widespread testing and
avoiding crowded spaces — which Americans might need to adopt sooner than later.
Trump also claimed that health insurance executives he met with “have agreed to
waive all copayments for coronavirus treatments.”
“For testing. Not for treatment,” a spokesperson for the powerful health
insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans, told Sarah Owermohle of
Politico.
When he mistakenly announced the import ban, it seems possible that Trump
simply misread the teleprompter, as is his wont — perhaps by inserting the word
“only” into the meandering phrase: “these prohibitions will not only apply to
the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get
approval.”
“Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing,”
the president added, in a statement that sounded both definitive and like the
sort of conversational aside he often slips into speeches after stumbling over
prepared remarks.
An hour after Trump concluded his address from the Oval Office, he tried to
clean up his mistake without admitting it, by tweeting: “please remember, very
important for all countries & businesses to know that trade will in no way be
affected by the 30-day restriction on travel from Europe. The restriction stops
people not goods.”
