Trump Mulls Emergency Declaration As Travel Ban Is Panned By Public Health Experts As A Useless Distraction

The Hill: Trump Weighing Potential Emergency Declaration For Coronavirus 
President Trump is weighing whether to declare a national emergency over the coronavirus, which would free up additional resources to combat the rapidly spreading disease. The president indicated to reporters that using an emergency declaration under the Stafford Act was under consideration, but would not say definitively whether he would sign it on Thursday. (Samuels, 3/12)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump Could Sign A Coronavirus Emergency Declaration Soon, Adviser Says
White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow made the disclosure in a conference call with GOP lawmakers Thursday morning, the people said. The White House declined to comment, and Mr. Kudlow didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. White House officials have for weeks been discussing an emergency declaration, likely under the 1988 Stafford Act, which would free up billions in Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster funds, administration officials said. The money would help local and state officials respond to the outbreak. (Restuccia, 3/12)

Politico: Trump Expected To Sign Order Unleashing Coronavirus Funding
Trump on Thursday said he is still mulling what emergency funding steps he will take. He is also pushing for Congress to pass a stimulus package, but lawmakers are bogged down over the details. “We have things that I can do,” Trump said in the Oval Office while sitting alongside Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. “We have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act. … I have it memorized as to the powers in that act. If we need to do something. I have the right to do a lot of things people don't even know about.” (Kumar, 3/12)

Politico: Trump Officials Did Sound The Coronavirus Alarm. They Just Don’t Work There Anymore.
On the January day a new coronavirus was identified in Wuhan, China, Tom Bossert, President Donald Trump’s former homeland security adviser, tweeted a stark warning: “we face a global health threat.” “Coordinate!” he implored. At the time, the coronavirus outbreak was isolated to China — a distant threat to America that did not seem to overly concern President Donald Trump. But Bossert was just one of several former Trump administration officials waving their arms. Other people like Scott Gottlieb, head of the Food and Drug Administration until 2019, and Gary Cohn, who once helmed the National Economic Council, were also on TV and Twitter, arguing the administration must prepare for the situation to get worse. The people who had once been seen as Trump’s guardrails inside the administration were now trying to educate from the outside. (McGraw, 3/12)

Politico: 'I Don't Want People Dying': Trump Defends Travel Ban After Confusing Primetime Address
President Donald Trump served up a freewheeling defense of his European travel ban Thursday, as senior administration officials sought to deliver a more controlled line of messaging in the aftermath of his primetime speech on the White House's coronavirus response. "I don't want people dying. That's what I'm all about," the president told reporters one day after announcing a 30-day ban on foreign visitors from most of Europe to fight the pandemic. (Forgey, 3/12)

NPR: Trump's European Travel Ban Questioned By Public Health Experts
The new restrictions which apply to 26 countries in Europe (but not the United Kingdom) came as a surprise to many E.U. leaders when Trump announced them. They also came as a surprise to many public health experts. "From a public health perspective, it's remarkably pointless," says Francois Balloux, an epidemiologist at University College London who worked with the World Health Organization on the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. Balloux says closing borders only works in the very early days of an outbreak, or for countries that haven't yet detected any cases at all. The U.S., as of Thursday afternoon, had confirmed 1,323 cases. (Beaubien, 3/12)

Boston Globe: ‘This Virus Is Everywhere.’ Experts Deride Europe Travel Ban As Useless
Public health experts on Wednesday condemned President Trump’s ban on travel from certain European countries, reacting with bafflement and derision to a measure they said would do nothing to control a pandemic that has already reached US shores. (Freyer, 3/12)

The New York Times: Trump’s Travel Ban Leaves Americans In Europe Scrambling To Get Home
Across Europe on Thursday, Americans scrambled to make sense of conflicting messages from Washington about if and when they would be allowed to return to the United States. They awoke to the news that President Trump had announced a 30-day suspension of most travel from Europe in a bid to stem the spread of the coronavirus. “To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,” Mr. Trump said. The travel restrictions would start at midnight Friday, he added. (Murphy, 3/12)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Coronavirus Travel Ban Deepens Tensions With European Allies
President Trump’s announced travel ban on Europe, beyond surprising European capitals, deepens tensions among trans-Atlantic allies whose ties are already strained over trade, security, climate change and what Europeans say is the U.S. failure to consult them. European governments complained that the announcement, made early Thursday Europe time, came without notice and coordination on what is a global health problem. Moreover, the U.S. ban, European Union leaders said, directly affects European citizens, barring many of them from travel to the U.S., and disregards the EU’s “strong action” to contain the new coronavirus. (Norma, 3/12)

The Washington Post: Inside Trump’s Failed 10-Minute Attempt To Control The Coronavirus Crisis
In the most scripted of presidential settings, a prime-time televised address to the nation, President Trump decided to ad-lib — and his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus. Even Trump — a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes — knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode. (Rucker, Parker and Dawsey, 3/12)

NBC News: Behind Trump's Coronavirus Shift
As President Donald Trump jetted back to Washington on Monday after a weekend of golfing and fundraising in Florida, an intervention was awaiting him at the White House. Administration officials, increasingly concerned about the messaging on and response to the coronavirus, had spent the weekend scrambling to craft a strategy to shift the president's response, which had been focused on downplaying the threat and accusing the media of creating undue concern, according to people involved in the effort. (Pettypiece, 3/12)

The Washington Post: For Trump, The Coronavirus Crisis Is All About The Numbers — And They Don’t Look Good
During weeks of briefings and discussions over the escalating coronavirus, President Trump has repeatedly fixated on one thing above all: the numbers. He has aggressively quizzed aides about infection statistics — asking how many cases are in each state, and how the quantity compares with other countries. He has clung to the rosiest projections, repeating only the figures that support his belief that the coronavirus is not morphing into a global catastrophe. And he has intensely followed the plummeting stock market, which plunged more than 1,600 points Wednesday. (Parker, Dawsey and Abutaleb, 3/12)

The Wall Street Journal: Coronavirus Crisis Tests Trump’s Unusual Governing Style
President Trump’s rare prime-time speech Wednesday was designed to reassure the nation about his administration’s response to a quickly spreading coronavirus. Instead, Mr. Trump’s scripted speech included errors about health-insurance payments and European travel restrictions, people involved in the speechwriting said Thursday. He also inserted his own mistakes as he spoke, the people said. (Bender, 3/12)

Meanwhile —

The Washington Post: Trump Says Still ‘Lots Of Options’ For Tokyo Olympics, After Call With Japan’s Abe
President Trump praised Japan's preparations for the Summer Olympics and said there were still "lots of options" for holding the Games, only hours after suggesting they might have to be postponed for a year due to the coronavirus outbreak. The shift in the president’s tone came after a phone call with Japanese leader Shinzo Abe. (Denyer, 3/12)

The Washington Post: Trump's Long-Standing Ties To Cruise Industry Tested By Coronavirus Pandemic
Huddled with donors at his private Mar-a-Lago Club on Friday, President Trump told supporters that he was intent on protecting the cruise industry from the fallout of the coronavirus crisis — even as top health officials and other key advisers were privately pushing him to keep the public off the ships. Two days later, the State Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned U.S. citizens, particularly those with medical issues, not to travel by cruise ship, sending the industry into a panic, according to people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. (Dawsey, O'Connell, Parker and Reinhard, 3/12)