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A US passport used to be an asset. Under Trump it has become a liability

Donald Trump’s favourite hobbies seem to consist of golf, Twitter and banning people from the US. Alas, he may no longer have the opportunity to do as much of the latter, because who would now want to come to the US anyway? The country is doing such a bad job of containing coronavirus that you are better off almost anywhere else. Indeed, last month, a number of American citizens in Lebanon declined a repatriation offer, saying they were safer in Beirut.

It’s not just a trip to the US that looks unappealing right now; it seems many countries aren’t exactly salivating at the prospect of hosting American visitors in the near future. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, for example, called the border with the US a clear “vulnerability” for Canada in terms of infections; the US-Canada border has been closed since March, and will remain closed to nonessential travel until at least 21 June.

Meanwhile, officials in Mexican border cities are reportedly tightening checks on visitors from Texas, because they’re worried new coronavirus cases are coming from the American side of the border. Which brings to mind a joke that is going around: what borders on stupidity? Canada and Mexico.

An American passport used to be an asset, now it’s looking rather more like a liability. “Italy plans to reopen to travellers on June 3 –but not to Americans” ran a recent headline in the travel magazine Afar. This is somewhat misleading: Italy is opening its borders and removing quarantine restrictions only for people from other countries in Europe, it is not singling out Americans. However, Americans aren’t used to being told they can’t do things and a screenshot of the article quickly went viral.

While Italy might not have explicitly implemented an American ban (yet), it seems increasingly likely that – as the Daily Beast put it – “American travellers are about to be pariahs in this new world.” The travel industry is still figuring out how to keep tourists safe, but it makes sense that countries doing a good job of managing the pandemic will heavily restrict entry to travellers from those doing a poor job. And the US is doing an extremely poor job.

Most worryingly, it feels as if Trump has given up trying to pretend to do any sort of job at all. The US neared the morbid milestone of 100,000 dead at the weekend; Trump marked the occasion by going to play golf (without a mask) and shaking people’s hands. When he wasn’t teeing off he was mouthing off: calling Hillary Clinton a “skank” and ordering that states reopen places of worship. It seems inevitable that Trump is going to do his best to open up the country way before it is safe, just because he is worried about the economy and his chances of re-election. Plus, Covid-19 is not exactly killing his base: it is disproportionately killing African Americans. To paraphrase Kanye West’s comments about George W Bush, I don’t really think Trump cares about black people.

“The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying,” the New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this month. Just as America has grown resigned to school shootings and preventable gun violence, he suggests, it looks as if it is becoming numb to Covid-19 deaths. Just as the US has prioritised the rallying call of “freedom” over common sense gun control, it looks set to prioritise “freedom” over public health. Looking at images from the crowded pool parties in Missouri over the weekend, looking at Trump’s calls for schools to reopen “ASAP”, it seems as if that is exactly what’s happening. But here’s the thing the US might soon find out about its highly individualistic freedom fetish: it doesn’t travel well.