Just imagine if Trump had stopped immigration in early February

President Trump announced Monday night that he plans to “temporarily suspend immigration” into the United States.

There are tons of valid questions about the legality and the mechanism of this supposed suspension, and like many tweeted promises of Trump, this might never really happen.

Here’s my question: Given how fiercely Trump has always spoken about the threats from immigration, why did he not take earlier and stronger steps to close our borders and limit foreign travel into the country?

Yes, he issued a “travel ban” on China shortly after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global health emergency. But that has been porous. Reportedly, 40,000 people have entered the U.S. from China since then, and the original plan didn’t put a special system in place to isolate returning Americans. Later, he issued European travel bans on March 11, but by then, the virus was already in the U.S. and spreading.

And yes, these restrictions were decried in the media as xenophobic, and those proposing travel bans earlier were called worse. Tom Cotton’s proposed travel ban in late January triggered a small rash of coronavirus-is-only-scary-if-you’re-racist pieces in the liberal media.

But if Trump were the guy he promised to be, and the guy the media often demonized him as being, he would have done a lot more, a lot earlier, on restricting entry in order to minimize invasion of the coronavirus.

Cotton, for instance, was calling for a ban on travel from China back on Jan. 22.

A week before, the first cases showed up outside of China, including in the U.S. What if, at that point (before the WHO declared it a global emergency), Trump had barred all entry from China? And what if when Europe started reporting deaths (Feb. 14 in France), Trump had simply closed off all entry into America?

By that point, only 12 cases had been identified in the U.S. It would have been an extreme step for Trump on Feb. 14 to ban all entry to the U.S. Of course, lots of complicated steps would have to be taken for U.S. citizens and residents who were traveling overseas, but imagine we started screening and even quarantining those few people that we allowed in. Taiwan did something like this.

Again, this is far stricter than anything any Western country has done, but Trump ran as an extraordinary immigration restrictionist.

Had Trump barred entry from China in late January (during impeachment) and then entry from every other country in mid-February, the media firestorm would have been immense.

Thanks to the Trump Effect (the magic power by which Trump controls the media’s opinion by driving them to declare the opposite of whatever he’s professing), we would have been bombarded with stories about how the virus wasn’t a big threat, China was containing it well, and Trump’s actions were counterproductive. More stories about Trump “sealing the U.S. off from the world” and about how we would suffer from “leaving the global community.”

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders would have reamed Trump for the shutdown. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have held pro-immigration rallies.

And then, over the course of March, the coronavirus spread throughout Europe and Asia. But if we combined an entry ban with contact tracing and quarantining, we could have minimized the need for lockdowns and still greatly suppressed the spread of the virus.

So right about now, we might have the virus under control, while most of the rest of the world was in lockdown with death tolls climbing, and Trump would have owned the libs beyond his wildest dreams.

But Trump spent much of the winter watching his impeachment and saying nice things about China, in part because he wanted a trade deal. His travel bans were porous and late. It’s sort of the story of his whole administration: Trump crafts an image of himself as someone who will most divide the country (earning plaudits from his base and bile from the media), but he never lives up, or down, to that self-crafted image.