Coronavirus: Donald Trump’s Europe travel ban bold, his delivery confused

US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with banking leaders on COVID-19 at the White House. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s bold move to ban most travel between Europe and the US for a month demonstrates how profoundly this episode will affect the global economy.

It also demonstrates that the US Commander-in-Chief regards this as a first-order crisis.

Tens of millions of Americans have close European connections and this move will disrupt their plans and activities a great deal.

But the medical advice is that it’s a useful measure in at least slowing the spread of the virus in the US.

Most Americans will accept that the crisis is great and needs commensurate action.

Overall, Trump’s tone was right.

Nonetheless he was caught in a contradiction of his own making. On the one hand, this was a “terrible infection” and the President was “marshalling the full power of the federal government”, but on the other hand it was also just “a temporary moment in time” that the US would soon overcome.

Early on in this episode, Trump downplayed the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and the US was too slow in rolling out large-scale testing. The communi­cations were confused and there was a lack of urgency.

The Trump administration ­deserves serious criticism for that, although in truth beyond perhaps Singapore, and to some extent South Korea and Japan, very few national governments can say they responded well.

And relatively homogeneous societies such as South Korea and Japan have options that Western societies do not have.

America, like Australia, runs on a “just-in-time” basis and is ­enmeshed in every aspect of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. This virus is almost designed to hurt societies like that.

Trump is not alone in being slow to acknowledge bad news. Indeed, pretty well every responsible national leader tries to keep their respective societies calm. Trump’s characteristic way of doing that is happy talk about the economy, the society, America generally, under his leadership.

The presidential address to the nation naturally contained some pure Trumpisms. Coronavirus was a “foreign virus” — perhaps the first disease to earn a citizenship status — originating in China and brought to the US by Euro­peans. He harshly criticised the EU for not imposing a travel ban on China early.

That criticism probably has some merit. The EU was very slow. It is also the case that the EU seems to regard the free movement of people as not only the highest human right known to history, but perhaps the primary purpose of human existence.

COVID-19 is going to result in a lot of reassessment right across the world. The EU dogma that having your passport stamped as you cross national boundaries is the first step to fascism will surely have to come under severe revision.

It is difficult to know exactly why Trump exempted Britain from his European travel ban. The UK has not been taking measures notably more stringent than those undertaken by most of Europe.

It looks as though it’s a demonstration of the “special relationship” between the US and Britain, perhaps even between Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The worst aspect of the President’s statement was that it had to be clarified almost as soon as it was delivered.

This was not a case of Trump veering off script. He read his ­remarks. But almost immediately the White House had to clarify that US citizens and permanent residents could still go back and forth to Europe, though this was discouraged. The ban applies to foreign nationals. It had to further clarify that the ban didn’t apply to cargo, only to people.

Governments all over the world have struggled to make and implement decisions fast, and to communicate them clearly. The White House has an army of speech writers and communications specialists. Still they got it wrong.

This virus challenges everybody in all kinds of unexpected ways.