Build the Wall update

China shut the barn door too late on Wuhan and we shut the barn door too late on China.
But how could it have been otherwise? Trump banned travel from China by foreign nationals on January 31, a point he’s returned to repeatedly lately as proof that he was taking the crisis seriously. Not true — his many comments in January and February about how the virus will go away soon cut the other way — but I’m trying to imagine how the public would have reacted if he had banned travel from China on, say, January 1 instead.

He would have been shredded by his antagonists. Democrats would have accused him of pulling a stunt to distract voters from impeachment. The media would have attacked him for a xenophobic overreaction to a problem that China seemed to be on top of. Some outlets criticized him for the ban on the 31st, in fact; here’s a piece at Stat quoting experts who thought the ban would be “counterproductive.” The shining lesson of the pandemic to date is that governments need to move earlier rather than later, but that if they do they’ll be pilloried by skeptics who don’t grasp the threat. Trump would have gotten a noseful of that if he’d acted more aggressively to limit traffic from China.