• He called COVID-19 a “foreign virus” and promised “the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront” it in “modern history.”
• He banned “all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days” to “keep new cases from entering our shores,” though later this turned out only to apply to non-US citizens (and not to people from Britain or Ireland, either, for some reason); Americans traveling abroad will still be tested (somehow) before being allowed onto planes.
• He announced that “I met with the leaders of health insurance industry who have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments,” which turned out not to be true (Common Dreams, 3/12/20), and that “we are cutting massive amounts of red tape to make antiviral therapies available in record time,” even though antivirals for the new virus aren’t available yet and may not be for some time (AP, 3/11/20).

Meanwhile, although Trump bragged in June 2019 that the wages of American workers “are rising at the fastest rate in many decades,” this claim is far from the truth. In fact, wages rose faster only a few years before, under his predecessor. Furthermore, an examination of what economists call “real wages”―wages offset by inflation―reveals that they have remained remarkably stagnant during the Trump era. As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics later reported, “real” average weekly earnings of American workers rose during 2019 by just one-tenth of 1 percent.

The wage stagnation of the Trump era is particularly hard on America’s vast number of low-paid workers. According to a study by the Brookings Institution appearing in late 2019, 44 percent of U.S. workers (53 million Americans) were employed in low-wage jobs that paid median wages of $18,000 a year. The writers of the report concluded that “nearly half of all workers earn wages that are not enough, on their own, to promote economic security.” Moreover, as data gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates, the percentage of low-wage workers has grown dramatically. Naturally, many of these workers have been forced, by economic necessity, to work two―and sometimes three―jobs to survive.

Trump has repeatedly tried to downplay the virus. Supporters such as Rush Limbaugh have claimed that the alarm over the virus is a plot to “bring down” Trump, and Fox Business host Charles Payne blamed the stock market slide on Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucuses. The president has pushed a widely disputed claim that the virus would “go away” once the weather gets warmer. “We’re probably down to about 10” cases, Trump falsely claimed during a press conference in India on Tuesday.