

Joe Biden speaks during a news conference Thursday. (Ryan Collerd/Bloomberg)

Columnist

It is an encouraging sign that in a speech Thursday afternoon, Joe Biden directly took on one of the very worst aspects of President Trump’s response to coronavirus: His use of the disease to fuel reactionary nationalist panic.

This bodes well for the coming campaign, should Biden become the Democratic nominee. It suggests that he may offer a sustained case against Trump’s xenophobic nationalism on other fronts, particularly immigration and trade, and weave it into a broader argument against Trumpism.

In his speech Thursday, Biden offered a sweeping critique of Trump’s handling of coronavirus, and put forth his own vision for responding to it. Biden proposed government funding for widespread free testing and assistance with paying for treatment; paid sick leave on an emergency and a permanent basis; and many other ideas.

[The latest updates on the coronavirus]

One could criticize Biden’s blueprint from the left: He didn’t propose free treatment, and he didn’t mount as aggressive a call for universal health care as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has done. But Biden offered a robust vision.

Meanwhile, in indicting Trump’s response, Biden focused squarely on Trump’s serial lying and downplaying of coronavirus’s seriousness in defiance of his own experts, and his systematic degradation of science and empirically grounded government.

But I wanted to flag this extended portion of Biden’s speech in particular:

We’ll never fully solve this problem if we’re unwilling to look beyond our own borders and engage fully with the rest of the world. A disease that starts anywhere on the planet, can get on a plane to any city on earth within a few hours. We have to confront coronavirus everywhere. We should be leading a coordinated, global response, just as we did to the Ebola crisis, that draws on the incredible capability of the U.S. Agency for International Development and our State Department, to assist vulnerable nations in detecting and treating the coronavirus wherever it spreads. We should be investing in rebuilding and strengthening the global health security agenda, which we launched during our administration, specifically to mobilize the world against the threats of new infectious diseases. It can be hard to see the concrete value of this work when everything seem to be going well in the world. But by cutting our investments in global health, this administration has left us woefully unprepared for the crisis we now face. No president can promise to prevent future outbreaks. But I can promise you this. When I’m president, we will be better prepared, respond better and recover better. We’ll lead with science. We’ll listen to the experts. We’ll heed their advice. We’ll build American leadership and rebuild it, to rally the world to meet the global threats that we’re likely to face again. And I’ll always tell you the truth. This is the responsibility of a president.

Trump and his advisers have used the crisis to try to invigorate his reactionary nationalist vision. Trump has dementedly tweeted that his border wall will save us from the virus. He has blamed Europeans for the spread of a “foreign virus” here. Top Cabinet officials and GOP senators have taken to calling it the “Wuhan virus.”

There are more sophisticated versions of this argument. Some Trump advisers have pushed the idea that coronavirus, and the threat to the global economy posed by China’s travails, show that we’re overly dependent on foreign-manufactured goods and global supply chains. And others have hinted that in some general sense, coronavirus undercuts the cosmopolitan and globalist mindset.

None of this makes any sense. Globalization is a way of organizing the global flow of goods and migration, but coronavirus been imported here by travel to and from the United States. Those two things, obviously, aren’t the same thing. And as Biden points out, we’re not going to stop the latter from happening in any concerted way.

Indeed, none of the things we associate with globalization are in any meaningful sense responsible for the coronavirus crisis.

On immigration, as Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam point out, there has been “no known U.S. case in which someone brought the virus to the U.S. while immigrating or making an asylum claim.”

But even if this became a serious problem, a temporary ban on certain types of immigration in response to a crisis like this one would not be in the least incompatible with tolerating generous legal immigration and asylum/refugee flows as a general matter, in non-crisis times. Even open-border advocates such as Alex Nowrasteh support temporary restrictions for such reasons.

On trade, previous global pandemics have caused worry about global supply chains. But as Robert Armstrong points out in the Financial Times, in those cases companies have responded by geographically diversifying supply chains to spread exposure and vulnerability around, not with a huge push to unwind them and make all production domestic again.

Our international trade system does have serious problems and negative impacts, but those call for revamped international trade deals and institutions. And if trade with China creates vulnerabilities for us, the far more likely answer to that would be a new industrial policy.

It would be folly to judge international trade writ large through the prism of our dependence on China supposedly revealed by coronavirus, since even if you conceded this as a cost, you’d have to weigh the benefits of international trade against it.

Coronavirus has spread in the United States largely because the response was tainted at the outset by a president who downplayed facts and reality for cynical political reasons, resulting in a string of delays, mixed signals and an incompetent government response. The culprit was not our open society. Preventing the spread will require extensive intra-border reductions in social mixing and better, sounder, more empirically grounded government — in short, better domestic and international leadership.

In this sense, it’s crucial that Biden condemned Trump’s xenophobic fearmongering and his disdain for facts, science and reality-based international cooperation in the same passage. Because those things are intimately intertwined with each other, and feed off similar impulses. In making this big argument, Biden has set a promising template for the campaign to come.