From future President Joe Biden in the Washington Post:
Because Trump can’t do the most basic parts of his job, the United States is now viewed as posing a global health risk. Today, America is first in infections, first in deaths, and the EU has decided to bar Americans from traveling there as Europe reopens.
And Biden concludes:
A president who started his term by writing hateful travel bans is responsible for getting the American people banned from traveling. His presidency is an outrage from start to finish.
What’s notable is the casting of Trump’s role in bringing about the E.U. ban as another form of deep damage to our international relationships — damage, of course, that Trump himself did on many other fronts. The monumental botching of the coronavirus pandemic, then, is both extension and exacerbation of that Trumpian damage.
The E.U. is reopening borders to 15 countries, but it excluded the United States, Russia and Brazil. The metric the E.U. used was the number of new cases in the past two weeks per 100,000 people. As the New York Times notes, “the average among the 27 European Union countries was 16 in mid-June; in the United States, it was 107.”