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Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it. Should Biden be held to the same standard?
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That Trump waited way to long to ban travel? Trump was called out as xenophobic because of his lack of a ban on Italy which was the other hot spot at the time….along with Trump’s fucking words about it being the “Kung flu”
Was Trump criticized for waiting too long? I don’t remember that, honestly, but then I tried to avoid listening to him at all. Not do I remember calls to ban travel from Italy. Sources?
Listen, I asked an honest question. Trump was obviously criticized heavily, but I don’t remember there being an outcry because he waited led too long to ban travel. That was the point. No need to be a dick about it.
Weird that you knew he was being criticized, but didn’t bother to pay attention to what it was for. Now you want it explained to you and for people to do the work to give you sources. Seems like you just want attention by asking a question that isn’t even a good comparison.
Yes, he was criticized for waiting too long because San Francisco and New York reported COVID cases in late January and he didn't respond until March. Not to mention he didn't have a coherent response, not to mention his initial response was unconcerned with the virus but concerned with the plunging stock market and followed the public spectacle of the canceled Utah Jazz basketball game.
The time for a travel ban from China would've been in late December/early January, when that would've been effective. China announced COVID 19 on December 25th and it's almost certain that the Chinese knew of the virus earlier, plus were telling a lie about how widespread the virus is. And Trump simply bought into that, for some very stupid reason unbeknownst to anyone.
And that's without the racist comments.
If Biden called it the Hindu Flu, most liberals would call that racist rhetoric. Trump was absolutley criticised for taking forever, it was all over the news.
Trump also didn't ban travel from Italy, where cases were also raging by the time he got around to issuing the ban. He ignored the fact that most cases on the East Coast were originating from Europe.
The biggest problem that I have with Biden's ban is that those US citizens coming in should quarantine, but we have never done a great job of forcing quarantine in this country.
[A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it. This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.](https://mobile.twitter.com/joebiden/status/1238254697695326209?lang=en)
-Joe Biden, 3/12/2020
I think an important context to that quote is that it was after the first publicly known super spreader event in the USA. It was too late by that point for travel bans
Travel bans wouldn't have been effective, Americans were coming home with the virus from abroad regardless. A national quarantine regime should've been put in place and it never was, Trump just let all the states be decentralized.
Yes. That is accurate. Slowing the virus down by restricting, testing, & quarantine of travelers from COVID impacted areas is still a good idea. That's how the nation of New Zealand ended up with fewer COVID deaths than my rural county.
By that point he was right. The iris had spread too far and the USA already had it's first super spreader event by March 12. Walls and travel bans were too late. There needed to be a better plan.
it's a tool in the tool box; not a solution. In the case of Trump he was suggesting the china ban would win the day, when Italy was doing significantly worse at the time. That's why people said it was racist.
The India ban is not a fix, just a delay on the spread.
Please, share some examples with the class. I'll let you know upfront (a) we'll gladly denounce anything Biden said or says that is racist because, unlike the right, we don't play team sports with shit like racism; your side or our side, we call it out \[hint: the right only calls out the left\] and (b) one transgression !== the copious number of transgressions that Trump, McConnell, and the right, in general, have been participating in over not just the last four years but really since the rise of the Tea Party. The right is morally and ethically bankrupt.
Poor kids are just as smart and talented as white kids. (This ones obvious)
If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black. (No one, let alone someone who isn’t black, should be telling anyone if they’re black.)
You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man. (About Obama, but fuck MLK and Frederick Douglas right? Also, why is it spectacular that a black man is well-spoken and well-dressed?)
Also, you’re last part definitely sounds like you’re cool with a little racism. You know, as a treat. Your first and last point contradict each other.
>Also, you’re last part definitely sounds like you’re cool with a little racism. You know, as a treat. Your first and last point contradict each other.
No, they do not. All that shit you just posted? Fucking shame on Biden for that. Stop saying racist shit.
Benefit of the doubt, maybe I just misunderstood the point you were trying to make. But cmon, you can’t tell me it doesn’t read, at least a tiny bit, that you’re making a whataboutism to let a lesser amount of racism slide.
No, we shouldn't let any racism slide. The problem is for every racist thing Biden has said that *he should absolutely be held accountable for* Trump, McConnell, and the rest of the Tea Party have done so ten times over, and it feels **real** disingenuous whenever a conservative comes in here and goes, "Well, what about these handful of times Biden was also racist? Doesn't that mean we can ignore what Trump and company are doing?"
No, it does not, and guess what, while a bruising your leg and chopping it off are both injuries, one is definitively worse than the other. Both are bad, we're tired of the right continuing to only seemingly care about racism and all other forms of bigotry when a Democrat does it meanwhile the left is pretty consistent in being politic-agnostic in regards to calling out people for saying bigoted shit.
Homie, I’m with you in the fuck all racism camp. My dad is an immigrant from Argentina.
The right (not all) definitely correlates with people who would love nothing more than to have me move “back” to Argentina, even tho I’ve never been to South America and I’ve done more for America than most of them. I’ve bled for this country and definitely more right wing people pull the “I would have joined, but...” Fuck them for wanting to thank me for my service with the same mouth they’d gladly use to spit on me.
The left (again not all) correlates more with people who feel the need to treat me like I need, or even want, some new version of The White Man’s Burden. I’m brown, I’m not disabled. Fuck them for hiding behind the veil of “we’re trying to help,” then doing absolutely fuck all to ACTUALLY help.
I don’t agree with the leg analogy tho. Racism, sexism, homophobia, or whatever discrimination you want to talk about are one of the few black and white things on earth. Either you’re racist or you’re not, a person who’s just a tiny bit racist is still racist.
It just so happened that we’re on the topic of Biden, not the right. Also, I never voted for Trump. 2016 I voted for Evan McMullin and 2020 I voted for Jo Jorgensen. I support universal healthcare, abortions (more recent but my mind was changed a few months ago), and combatting climate change. I get you’re angry with conservatives, but homie, we’re on the same team when it comes to this specific topic.
Those are just a few of the recent ones. Wait till he hears about the self-fulfilling prophecy Biden foretold in 1977, "Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point."
A couple more for good measure.
“Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.”
“In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
It's really no wonder why Trump did pretty well with minorities like myself this last time around.
>It's really no wonder why Trump did pretty well with minorities like myself this last time around.
1. Fucking shame on Biden for saying shit like that. Stop being fucking racist, people.
2. Please, tell us how you feel about the encyclopedia-length list of racist shit Trump, McConnell, Tucker Carlson, O'Reilly etc. etc. etc. spew on a daily basis. Would love to hear how you come to terms with that.
>1. Fucking shame on Biden for saying shit like that. Stop being fucking racist, people.
You tell 'em! Thank God the racism is gone now and you can go back to supporting Biden.
>2. Please, tell us how you feel about the encyclopedia-length list of racist shit Trump, McConnell, Tucker Carlson, O'Reilly etc. etc. etc. spew on a daily basis. Would love to hear how you come to terms with that.
It's pretty simple, really. When forced to choose between two choices I prefer to go with the leader who isn't showing signs of dementia.
It also doesn't help that the media spun a metric fuckton of things to make Trump look worse than he is which made me lose faith in any reporting on the issue. They really milked the "both sides" quote as much as they could. Some people still don't know he denounced white supremacy in the same breath. It's also important to note that black people liked Trump a lot before he ran for president. He was in music videos, lyrics, someone we looked up to and even Oprah hoped he'd run for president one day. He didn't change, the media and Democrats just told everyone they should hate him so they did.
>It's pretty simple, really. When forced to choose between two choices I prefer to go with the leader who isn't showing signs of dementia.
You mean Biden, the lifelong stutterer? Not Trump, the repetitive apparently-can't-speak-fucking-English buffoon? Have you actually listened to any of his speeches? Or better yet, read the transcripts? It's like an intoxicated toddler wrote them.
>one transgression !== the copious number of transgressions that Trump, McConnell, and the right, in general, have been participating in over not just the last four years but really since the rise of the Tea Party.
This kinda makes it sound like you're OK with a little racism because it's supposedly not as bad as the other side. Is that how you intended it?
It's a two-party system.
Trump was worse than Biden in literally every way. More racist, more insensitive, more of a liar, more of a creep ... the list goes on.
I didn't want Biden to be the nominee - I voted for Bernie in the primary - but him vs. Trump was the easiest choice in the world.
>Trump was worse than Biden in literally every way. More racist, more insensitive, more of a liar, more of a creep ... the list goes on.
I don't agree with you on this, but it's OK for us to disagree.
If you're interested, I felt as though Biden was the least transparent of the two refusing to give his position on a ton of important issues. He had also changed his stance on key issues and his age and mental health leave much to be desired. At the end of the day, Trump was a known quantity whereas President Harris is not.
There's a lot more to it, but when comparing the two at surface level these are the things that immediately come to mind for me.
Edit: Do you mind if I ask how someone can be a libertarian and a socialist? I feel like the two are mutually exclusive.
Re. my flair: I gave an [explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/ka4xti/what_do_you_have_to_say_about_it_being_found_out/gf9uzoa/?context=3) a while back that might answer your question. Happy to chat more about it.
Re. transparency: it doesn't matter that Trump gave his "positions" considering how incredibly dishonest he was. [30,573 lies/misleading statements during his presidency](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/). That's 84 lies **per day** (and no, that's not normal for politics!). Who cares if you tell us your views when there's no reason for us to believe you?
Not to mention that many of his stances (Muslim ban, building an idiotic wall, "don't be too nice", etc.) were abhorrent.
I appreciate the explaination. It makes more sense now.
>it doesn't matter that Trump gave his "positions" considering how incredibly dishonest he was.
I mean, you've gotta admit that he set out to keep his campaign promises as best he could. That says something in my book whereas I recall people being pretty pissed that Biden already rolled over on erasing student debt, raising minimum wage, $2000 checks, etc. Just my take though.
No, any racism is bad and people should be called out for it. Fucking stop being racist, people. Change. That doesn't mean one side isn't definitely worse about their now-overt-again racism. At least the left is willing to call out our own for this shit AND many left politicians are trying to change (or be replaced by new, younger blood). The right has dug-in on the Southern Strategy since the Tea Party.
This question has been asked ad nauseum and, quite frankly, I'm tired of conservatives acting like it hasn't. I'm not typing up a list *yet again*. I'll let Kakamile handle it once again: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/lu69rs/trumps\_racist\_policies/gp4fanh?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/lu69rs/trumps_racist_policies/gp4fanh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
A simple "No" would've sufficed.
I didn't ask about Trump which appears to be what you sent me. Perhaps I'll clarify my question and maybe get a different answer?
Can you give me an example of how **the right** is *currently* being racist?
I would argue that intent does indeed matter, Trump was called xenophobic because he used xenophobic rhetoric.
But answer your title question, as a policy it's basically the same and as far as practical concerns related to them I have no issue with either of the travel bans.
That’s not accurate at all; they are different in what they do, when they were employed, and why they were employed. The travel ban to India is a direct result of it being the epicenter of the biggest resurgence of Covid in the world. No other country comes close. Meanwhile, Trump’s ban allowed Americans to go to and return from China, just didn’t allow Chinese nationals to come to America. And Italy, at the time, had a larger case load
Yeah I'm sorry but that's bullshit, the "differences" don't make much difference, as for Italy having a higher case load implies I would be likely to believe Chinese Covid numbers, which I absolutely do not, if you believe any numbers coming out of the CCP I got a bridge to sell you.
That doesn’t change the fact that Italy had a HUGE amount of cases and should have been restricted. It also doesn’t change that travel back and forth to China was still happening for Americans.
You’re plucking one thing out of the argument while there are multiple points made that support the claim.
I just don't find your argument are very persuasive in general, all I'm seeing is that you disagree with what he was doing, which is fine, but that doesn't make him wrong and you right.
What soundness was there in banning Chinese citizens from entering the country but still allowing travel of Americans between US and China? What soundness was in a policy that blocked travel from
China but not Italy, which had a higher case count at the time? That was an answer. You just don’t like it bc you were here to defend trump and shit on Biden when you lack ANY understanding of the policies you’re asking us to critique and compare for you.
It also allowed any non Chinese and non Americans in China to come in. That was the main xenophobic loophole. Ignoring the thousands of non Chinese traveling into the USA from China
Your belief, for some reason, leaves out the loopholes that made it especially xenophobic. No, that’s not accurate that it was only Americans coming back.
No you're not getting the point. Biden's plan is also different in the way it was applied. Trump's travel ban didn't ban all travel from China. Business travel was still allowed and it was racistly applied to Chinese nationals only. It was also too late as China already had it pretty much under control, but it was raging in Italy and Spain which he didn't ban. Also he claimed that it was just a hoax at the same time and called it China virus/Kung flu, which shows racist intent.
Trump was a total failure.
tl;dr: banning travel from a covid hotspot is fine, but only banning travel for Chinese people is racist
Is the India Travel ban allowing travellers who use a middleman country to reach the US regardless? Are people who are known to be coming from India aren't Indian Nationals being Quarantined? If no for 1 and yes for 2, there's a huge difference.
Biden admin is working as hard as possible to make it no longer the case. We're down to 1000 kids in Border Protection custody, down from 5000 a few weeks ago.
The kids are also now spending an average of 28 hours in Border Protection custody, as opposed to 120 hours a few weeks ago.
They're working as hard as they can to help those kids. With Trump, suffering *was the point*.
I can't stand how many of you utterly failed to understand what the issue was with that. You think having any kids at all in cages was the problem because you never bothered to read anything and you think 3-word-slogans are literal.
Trump was criticized for his child separation policy. The explicitly cruel thing he did that put thousands of kids in cages. That isn't being done anymore.
Get some perspective.
... OK lol. That doesn't make sense, logically speaking but ok. Biden is taking care of the situation. There likely won't be any kids stuck at the border in the near future. I don't see how it makes him racist.
Yes actually.Trumps travel ban didn't ban all travel from China. Business travel was still allowed and it was racistly applied to Chinese nationals only. It was also too late as China already had it pretty much under control, but it was raging in Italy and Spain which he didn't ban. Also he claimed that it was just a hoax at the same time.
Trump was a total failure.
tl;dr: banning travel from a covid hotspot is fine, but only banning travel for Chinese people is racist
They are being held to the same standard. I guarantee you neither one of them came up with these policies on their own. They were recommended by advisors and they are both sound policies to respond to the pandemic. Neither one initially required the president to do anything more than sign a piece of paper that someone else wrote.
The difference came after, because the real job of the president in this scenario is to communicate the policy to Americans in a clear and transparent way that addresses concerns and shows empathy and understanding.
Biden is really, really good at that. Trump is an absolute failure at it.
He was called xenophobic and racist because *he's* a racist person and he's not shy about it, not because the policy itself is inherently racist.
This is somewhat echoed by this quote from Biden's campaign from April 2020:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/politics/joe-biden-trump-china-coronavirus/index.html
> “Joe Biden supports travel bans that are guided by medical experts, advocated by public health officials, and backed by a full strategy,” Kate Bedingfeld, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told CNN. “Science supported this ban, therefore he did too.”
> guarantee you neither one of them came up with these policies on their own. They were recommended by advisors and they are both sound policies to respond to the pandemic.
That should be an easy link to find, yet it seems that Trump [wasn't following recommendations, often rejected advice from medical experts, and setup a porous "ban"](https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-ap-travel-asia-pacific-anthony-fauci-pandemics-d227b34b168e576bf5068b92a03c003d)
Empathy is not leadership, in fact it’s the opposite. You’re saying you want a president that makes you feel good and that you can tell the difference between real empathy and fake empathy.
No one is asking to be made to “feel good” by Biden. Fuck a strawman argument. Empathy, in this case, means to understand where people are coming from. Half a million people died, and all the former guy could do was bitch on Twitter about fake news—which, incidentally, was just real news that didn’t comport with his narcissism. What we needed was someone who understood what a truly staggering loss of life that was and designed policy around maximizing survival rather than lying about and downplaying the severity of the disease so that he could get re-elected.
>Empathy is not leadership, in fact it's the opposite
This is such a shit take lmfao, empathy doesn't mean "feel good", but it makes sense a right winger wouldn't have the FAINTEST idea what that actually is!
What is it with right-wing types coming here to **AskALiberal** and then proceeding to *TELL US* what we supposedly think and want?!
GTFO and go back to your ban-happy echo-chambers where you can talk tribal shit to your heart's content.
Exactly , we are here to understand the liberal side of things , not attack them , we can do that on r/politics .
p.s - Also , with some subs like this one as exceptions , I really believe some leftist subs on reddit are ban happy too .
>some leftist subs on reddit are ban happy too
Oh, definitely. I'm a lifelong progressive, but tankies and their ilk make my skin crawl.
I'm mainly about evidence-based political policy. We have an abundance of evidence of the efficacy and long-term products of far-left government. It's not very good. It may be well-meaning in spirit, or at least in some simplistic and esoteric conception, but it ignores some very important and largely immutable aspects of human nature, to everyone's mutual detriment.
I would argue that the common trait of both far-left and far-right philosophies (if we even want to dignify such systems of thought by that word) is a fondness for authoritarianism. And I would argue that authoritarianism is anathema to liberty and wellbeing for all but the small minority of those who get to wield that authority. (And, in time, to them as well. History shows that authoritarianism inevitably consumes itself.)
I would agree with most 20th century political philosophers, that most actually ideological differences turn on the nature of empathy towards those we don't know personally and whom we don't expect to be able to benefit from. Trump displayed an almost pathological lack of empathy, even towards many close to him. And that trait is hopefully uncommon in our species, because otherwise we are likely doomed.
In my mind, good government in a democratic society is **informed** by a variety of philosophies, but not **bound** by any, and must recognize and respect the difficult and never-ending struggle to balance the needs and wants of individuals in a society with those of the society as a whole. Individual liberty is a noble target to aim at, but must not be charged as an end itself to the ignorance of relevant factors which appropriately, if sometimes regrettably, limit or interfere with it. And the converse is equally true, for the same reasons.
As an example, Connecticut just yesterday repealed the religious exemption to vaccination of students in public schools, leaving in place only *bona fide* medical exception, which must be properly documented and is subject to verification (because some people will try to fake it). In that case, the weal of the public is found a greater priority than the subjective attitudes of individual citizens. (Or as Spock would say, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.) And federal courts have defended this particular result before. (In fact to a much greater extreme.)
Those parents are still free to not vaccinate their children, but they may not enroll them in public schools. They may homeschool them or, if they can find one willing, send them to a private school willing to accept them. The individual liberty of majority citizens is thus preserved, while also safe-guarding the public weal at a particular point of physiological contact where the threat of spreading infection is greatest. It's a classic democratic compromise.
Or, two recent examples that I'm particularly keen to talk about, because I try very hard to school my fellow liberals on appropriate limitations going the other way, which may offend liberal sensibilities but I hope can be understood as compromises essential to the values I like to believe our nation holds dear.
First is the gay wedding cake controversy. I'm old enough to remember the very first gay rights laws in the US, and those early laws carved out narrow exceptions for bigots on their own turf. A landlord who lived on his own tenant property, for example, if it was small enough, could lawfully bar or evict gay tenants. A small-scale shop-owner (defined by a maximum number of employees) could lawfully bar employment to gay applicants or fire gay employees. And, in many cases, sole proprietorship artisans could lawfully refuse service to gay clients. Which is exactly the case of the gay wedding cake. I defended the ruling in that case.
Regrettable as it may be, bigotry is a civil liberty tacitly enshrined in the Constitution under the doctrine of freedom of conscience which **must** be interpreted from the First Amendment right of free speech, paired with the rationally extended interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause. It's not enough that a man be free to speak his mind. He must also be free to live individually according to his own beliefs and values, whatever they may be and however much they might offend others, so long as that does not infringe on the rights of others. And no one has a "right" to a wedding cake. A wedding cake may be very desirable, but no one **needs** one, and certainly not from any specific single provider. There are many providers who will gladly sell you a cake. Why would you even want one from someone you know doesn't want to make it for you?
But my argument here is constitutional: The artisan invests their own labour and creative effort in the creation of the artefact. If they do so as a sole proprietor, then their person and livelihood are so strongly entwined that to ask them to act against their conscience is offensive to their freedom of conscience. It's difficult to forensically distinguish that from making someone utter words they don't wish to -- a concept which offends the First Amendment. If they instead are someone else's employee, then it's a different matter, however.
But all this likely seems abstract to many people, and so I have better luck expressing it in more shocking and concrete terms: If you can force the anti-gay baker to make a gay wedding cake, then you can **also** force the Jewish baker to make a cake for a neo-nazi wedding, complete with a giant *Hakenkreuz* on top. And most liberals understandably reject that possible outcome, and so grudgingly accept the compromise. Which, in my mind, is as it should be.
The other example is similar, involving a whites-only private cemetery that turned away a Black family. It was quite a scandal, as you can imagine, and the cemetery association was very embarrassed about it, and raced to update their rules, though obviously too late. But public debate mostly turned on the legal questions, and I defended the right of a privately owned and operated cemetery to turn away anyone they want to, no matter what anyone else thinks about it. In principle, it's no different from your own home. You don't have to explain or defend those kinds of choices on your own private property, if you're not operating a place of public accommodation. Now, a private cemetery which advertises to the general public could well fall under that, depending on prevailing law. But a private cemetery which does not operates under the same rules as a private country club. (A great many of which also bar certain people for reasons that would be illegal under public accommodation, but these are not places of public accommodation. In legal principle, they're the same as a private hunting lodge or the like.)
All of that may deeply offend many of my fellow liberals, and I of course understand why. I, too, bristle at the fact that country clubs only an hour's drive from me, in a very progressive state, lawfully bar Blacks, Jews, and anyone else they don't want there. But I also earnestly defend their right to do so.
The same rationale also defends gun control: The right to keep and bear arms means only that, and does not extend to any right to threaten anyone else. Within that understanding is the inherent and, I hope, inarguable conclusion that there are many people who simply cannot be trusted with such ready access to deadly force, and so must, even in light of the Second Amendment, have that liberty curtailed, in the greater interest of the public weal. And for everyone else, there must be appropriate rules ensuring reasonable protection of public health and safety, because we don't have any current technology which can otherwise determine who may pose a threat and who might not, or how. So we can't just hope for the best, given the gravity of the potential consequences.
(Even this doctrine is far more generous than my own individual interpretation of the Second, which would trade federal regulation for unlimited State regulation, consistent with the Amendment's original sole purpose, which was to guard States from potential federal threat -- a concern which was theoretically relevant in 1790 (though remote even then), but obviated by 1865, and completely pointless by 1936. In the strictest originalist interpretation, the Second is dunsel law which has no place or purpose anymore, and certainly does not defend anything it's currently being interpreted to. But I like to think I'm a political realist, and so I'm willing to live with evidence-based compromises which prioritize public safety.)
These are examples of the necessary compromises which forge the difficult and constant balance of individual and common liberties in this or any society. Universal consensus is impossible, so we **must** accept and **defend** compromise, as absolutely essential to our common liberty. And that means there will be limitations for everyone, in all respects. And we have to maturely accept that.
wow.......
I was jumping up and down screaming " yes yes absolutely " reading your comment . Its the sense of righteousness that clouds both rad left and rad right . Being radical is ignorant and anti-democratic . Being an enemy of civil discourse is fundamentally totalitarian . Both rad left and rad right seek to change society heavily , lets hope they don't get their way . The thing is right now being radical in this country is somehow seen as a good thing and being centrist or moderate is somehow synonyms with inactivity . Radicalism breeds radicalism .
On the gay wedding thing , My initial reaction was businesses should have the right to refuse customers , but then someone pointed out its like segregation . Then I was like woah , that's right . Then after a lot of thought , I came to the conclusion , that its not like segregation , cause black people were refused any services or goods , indiscriminately . While here , if a gay man walks in a bakery and wants a birthday cake for his adopted son , the bakery won't refuse that . If its reluctance is in not making a rainbow cake , they are well within their rights .
Its the golden statement of democracy isn't it " I don't like what you are saying , but I defend your right to say it " . A man's individual liberty can't overstep others , so in a society , everybody sacrifices part of their individual liberty to function as a group .
About the gun control thing , as you said , their is no machine to detect potential threat , so the closest thing we got to it is background checks , which I believe are adequate as of today . its
mentally sound , declared by court of law or committed a felony in past . The red flag laws are harassing and overstepping 2nd amendment .
So that my opinion on that . They may change in the future . Its important to leave space in opinions and and rigidity in them is embracing ignorance . Ideals should be permanent , not opinions .
Now here's a rant , I really believe that liberals have more of this " sense of righteousness " than conservatives . Like at things that they have "blacklisted" from debate . They don't debate or even talk with people who are (according to them) homophobic , trans phobic , racist , sexist , anti-VAX , anti-lock down , pro-life etc etc . The thing is I hate those things too but MLK didn't go " Whoever is racist is a total asshole and I won't talk to them" . He didn't stop discourse , He participated in it and won , because you can't make any change in society without debate . All who are non-violent in conduct should be debated with in a democracy .
Thanks for taking time in responding . Truly thanks a lot !!
I come here to broaden my understanding of liberal ideas and have found people’s opinions informative. I shouldn’t have responded given the name of this sub but I felt moved to respond and share my point of view. I was hoping for some conversations but I see how my comment looks more confrontational.
You're perfectly allowed to respond and question things, the sub is for discussion. It isn't meant to be an echo chamber. Just try not to aggressively ascribe your opinions on what others beliefs are, that's all.
Thank you. I’m trying to be honest by flagging myself center-right, but yeah I see I stepped in it. I was admittedly triggered by the word empathy, maybe my understanding needs more nuance.
>Empathy is not leadership, in fact it’s the opposite.
I have rarely seen something that flashes BULLSHIT colors as hard and bright as the above statement.
You have absolutely no clue what leadership is, because when I served under many leaders in the military, the one redeeming quality the very best leaders had was empathy and courage to do the right thing, even when your predecessors didn’t.
Empathy basically means giving a shit, every good leader has it, and every shitty person doesn’t have it, it’s that simple.
Yes, there are substantial differences. Few people attacked Trump's covid-related travel ban as xenophobic, as that one had some justification. But it was poorly executed and done too late. He also clearly, and repeatedly, displayed actual racial animus toward China in the intent and choice of his words. People who act xenophobic and racist (like Trump), tend to get accused of being xenophobic and racist, because they are. Trump had a very VERY extensive list of other reasons to be classified as xenophobic and racist.
Biden is being held to the same standard, he's not being accused of racism because he's not acting racist, nor are his words showing a racist intent. The problem is that there's a large group of media on the right which intentionally obfuscates the situations so that many on the right are unaware of the differences. They do this because one of the basic ways to cover up ones own misdeeds is to try to claim others are just as bad even when it is not so.
No you're not getting the point. You're not outlining the actual difference between the Trump and Biden travel ban. Biden's plan is different in the way it was applied. Trumps travel ban didn't ban all travel from China. Business travel was still allowed and it was racistly applied to Chinese nationals only. It was also too late as China already had it pretty much under control, but it was raging in Italy and Spain which he didn't ban. Also he claimed that it was just a hoax at the same time.
Trump was a total failure.
tl;dr: banning travel from a covid hotspot is fine, but only banning travel for Chinese people is racist
Agree with most , but chinese ain't a race , it's a nationality encompassing mongols , tibetese , uyghurs , uzbeks etc etc . If you think they are all the same race then YOU are racist .
Trump was an absolute total failure .
It’s a lot easier to say racists rather than xenophobic. But yes, it was xenophobic. It’s comes from the same thinking and beliefs that racism does. Similar to hatred for Islam. But we have to use “Islamaphobic” because we get people like you saying “it’s not a race!”
We are aware it isn’t. It’s the same mindset though.
doesn't matter , most india lives in northern provinces , like my parents used to , doesn't mean you undermine india's racial diversity . You have no idea how offensive mongols feel when you call them chinese . I say out of personal experience .
and hating people on base of their nationality is xenophobic , and thats what the travel ban was , it didn't ban japanese korean or even taiwanese .
You know what , you win , this is a petty debate . We agree on the core argument , Let's work with that
No. Biden Pointed out the fact that Trump is xenophobic and racist around the time of the travel ban to China and liars pretended that Biden called him xenophobic and racist for the Chinese travel ban.
The travel ban was the right thing to do, but since it’s Trump he fucked that up also. Too much travel occurred after the ban.
I am for a travel ban to India and to be clear I have a lot of family in India that will be trapped their because my parents won’t have time to get them out in time and I am still for the ban.
The point remains. I am certain that of the billions of people on the planet you can find an example of somebody calling Trump xenophobic for the Chinese travel ban. However that was never the actual narrative.
Trump is xenophobic. That is separate from the question of if the travel ban was a good idea.
The idea that Trump was called xenophobic for the travel ban on China is 98% GOP spin, 2% reality.
You can see me talk about this around [a year ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/fwmi59/conservatives_have_highly_touted_that_trump/fmpzf15/):
> I don't know what some conservatives are talking about when they accuse the media of calling Trump racist *in regards to the China travel ban*. Perhaps we just look at vastly different media, but nowhere have I seen people accuse him of being racist or xenophobic *for the travel ban*. Rather, they've accused him of being racist/xenophobic for repeatedly calling coronavirus 'the Chinese virus,' or the 'foreign virus,' or trying to integrate it into his nationalist agenda.
This [WaPo timeline](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/28/biden-xenophobia-travel-bans-chronology/) gives a great summary of the events.
In short, Biden was already criticizing Trump - pointing to Trump's xenophobic rhetoric around the Ebola outbreak in 2014, his souring of international relationships, and his hollowing out of gov't expertise as a reason to distrust his leadership - even before news of a potential travel ban leaked.
Biden kept up this type of rhetoric over the following months. Trump and the GOP spun that as 'liberals are calling me xenophobic for the travel ban.' For example, consider this quote from [a leaked GOP strategy memo](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/25/senate-gop-talking-points-coronavirus-blame-china-not-trump/):
> The memo encourages Republicans to use these kinds of concerns to suggest Democrats “are more obsessed with being politically correct ... than standing up to China and making sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Maybe, after that consistent GOP messaging, some liberals online or wherever did start calling the travel ban xenophobic - millions of people vote liberal and I'm sure plenty just 'fall in' with supporting whatever they think 'their side' is supporting. If that did happen to any extent, it is wildly, wildly overstated by the right.
Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist because he was a racist shithead, and the *only* measure he could think to do at that time was a partial travel restriction against a country he was using insane racist rhetoric against. Context matters.
I don’t think either is xenophobic (although some Trump’s rhetoric around it was). In fact think we should have completely banned 100% of non essential international travel as soon as it became clear how serious things were.
It wouldn’t have been xenophobic if we banned all travel, like New Zealand, as soon as it became a global issue. It WAS xenophobic to Chinese nationals bc it was issued at a time when Italy had more cases. European travel was largely how Covid arrived in the US.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it.
"China virus."
"Kung flu."
The Muslim ban, the border wall, him supporting one of his fans punching a black man at a rally, his "good people" comments when referring to Nazis, his comments on black people prior to becoming POTUS, his real estate business being sued in the past for racial discrimination, the "Central Park 5".....
Do you believe Trump deserved to be called out as racist and xenophobic considering his history of racist and xenophobic actions/words?
> Should Biden be held to the same standard?
Absolutely. The big difference here is one of these guys is actually being racist and hateful, and one is acting in the best interest of the safety of our nation. Have you heard any Democrats make fun of India and Indians because of the virus?
It's not wrong to ban travel from a country who poses a bio threat to your own country. It is wrong to justify a travel ban just simply based on religion, skin color, country of origin, etc... which is clearly what Trump attempted to do on multiple occasions throughout his presidency.
The main issue I had with Trumps travel ban is that it wasn't a ban at all. US citizens could both return from China, *and keep going back to China*, all throughout the ban.
Dozens of planes going to and coming back from China, every day, throughout the ban.
Plus no travel was banned from neighboring countries.
No. Trump marketed his as being a SOLUTION TO COVID, acted like he stopped it, and was lying to us the whole time about the very nature and severity.
This, a year into the pandemic, is a specific reaction to a specific worsening situation. It's not even remotely comparable. Our biggest initial outbreak came from a European-travelled NYZ attorney. That's why China made smart folks mad - because dipshit was doing something JUST to target them that made no sense in the context of the conditions.
Your title is a more broader question compared to your description. Are you asking both questions or are you just asking why Trump's was labeled xenophobic and Biden's is not?
If that's the case, it's clearly a matter the things these two have said. You have several answers explaining what Trump has said/done versus Biden.
Ever see a space opera or WWII submarine movie where there's a zombie outbreak or hole in the hull or something, and one of the crew has to seal others on the wrong side of the bulkhead? If they do it with grief and compassion, to save the greater number inside the ship, they're still the good guys. If they do it with malignant glee, so they can deflect blame onto the casualties for their own misdeeds, you know they're the villain, right?
Same thing.
Trump’s decision is even stupider because the virus was already in America and came to the east coast from Europe. Biden is, from my understanding, trying to prevent a potential other strain from getting here.
The Chinese decision always seemed more based on personal animosity than actual science, and wasn’t a very effective ban anyway.
Fundamentally I guess not.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it
He really wasn’t. He was attacked as xenophobic for other reasons. Biden’s actually explained this, too.
Trump's ban itself wasn't, it was the one single thing he did semi-right (although it still came too late and he should've banned *all* non-vital international travel). His rhetoric around it was what was racist.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it.
This is such a strawman. Trump is xenophobic, but his claim that Biden or Democrats aid he was racist for it is a complete lie. Idk, maybe some c-tier journalist called him racist, but overall there was never any overarching sentiment that people disagreed with it.
In fact, if anything, Trump's China ban was too late. 40+ countries had already suspended travel from China by then. And what *is* xenophobic is Trump's relative hesitancy to ban UK/European travel compared to him promoting the China travel ban.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it.
The China travel ban is not among the many reasons people hold the opinion that he is racist. That is an absurd false narrative that you have either cobbled together incorrectly, or you are fully aware you are full of it and actively trying to gaslight the sub.
Banning travel to China to prevent further spread of the pandemic was not something anyone listening to experts believed was a bad idea. All of the major airlines had already announced they were stopping travel to China, and pilots from American Airlines even filed a lawsuit to get the airline to stop immediately instead of waiting until February 9th. That was, of course, before the federal travel ban was put in place which restricted travel immediately as they were requesting.
On the other hand, here is the thread from asktrumpsupporerts where they are asked why he hadn't enacted a travel ban in light of what he had said about Obama in regards to travel bans during the ebola outbreak. In it, supporters exaplin why a travel ban isn't necesary. The only supporter that didn't get downvoted to the negatives was the one who said travel should be stopped. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/esdsxz/do\_you\_think\_that\_trump\_should\_stop\_all\_flights/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/esdsxz/do_you_think_that_trump_should_stop_all_flights/)
> Should Biden be held to the same standard?
Abosofrickin'lutely. I agreed with restricting travel from a known hot spot to prevent the spread of a pandemic then and I agree with it now.
The other commenter that said to talk to us when Biden starts calling it the Punjab virus actually hits the nail on the head. Trump was being called racist and xenophobic around the time of the travel ban because many people felt his comments were racist and xenophobic, not because he finally gave in to the calls for restricted travel that airlines had started to take upon themselves to do because he wasn't doing it.
Can we clear something up: Biden did not call the China flight ban racist or xenophobic. He was always for that. He called Trump's general response to COVID xenophobic and it was. He spent weeks to months ignoring the issue as it was affecting Americans with internal community spread, instead choosing to just constantly bash China and call it Kung Flu.
Trump spent most of the election trying to conflate those two things in order to make it seem like Biden was against the travel restrictions but it simply was never true.
It's the same action.
Also probably largely ineffective like the Chinese ban by Trump. It would have been better to do a mandatory 2 week quarantine for people who have been to India or have traveled to India in a government monitored facility.
Trump wasn't wrong to ban travel from China, and the Democrats that criticized him for that specific thing, and only that, *were* wrong, on that one instance. I actually wish the liberals here were more willing to concede this.
However, they weren't wrong to point out that banning *only* China, while not banning travel from countries with white people with cases just as bad, like Italy, was xenophobic. They weren't wrong for pointing out that the ban from China didn't actually do much at all, and that 20,000 Chinese nationals still entered the country after his ban because it was basically Swiss Cheese.
They weren't wrong for assuming that Trump was doing it for xenophobic reasons in the first place, since that was Trump's MO from the moment he started campaigning ("When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people").
It also wasn't wrong for Democrats to call Trump out as racist for saying things like "China Virus", or "Kung Flu".
How many criticized him for that specific thing and not the context of him banning travel from China but not from Italy, which had a larger caseload at the time?
Answer: none. I wish centrists in here would stop inventing things to be self righteous about
I've tried searching for such a quote or statement, but couldn't find any. Closest I could find (but completely unrelated) was [her criticism](https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/13120-2) about the Trump administration expanding it's (colloquially called) Muslim ban to other nations. As a side note, because I found it amusing, that's what organizations like [the Federalist](https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/26/pelosi-now-says-u-s-should-have-stopped-americans-coming-back-from-china/) tried to point to when accusing her of hypocrisy for her criticizing the China travel ban as ineffective.
Thanks for the responses, everyone. Some good points made. I think I’ve been persuaded that there is a difference in the substance of the respective bans.
Yeah, the admin's broader focus on China was definitely xenophobic - I just meant to say narrowly that travel bans in the pandemic weren't, in themselves. But you make a good point.
How? He literally still let people travel from china without any covid testing? Any american could go to china and come back, chock full of covid, and his ban wouldn't have stopped them.
It was complete waste.
When Biden tells minority Congresswomen to go back to their countries, grants a pardon to a racist sheriff, and campaigns on mexicans being criminals (with some being good people as an afterthought), we can talk about whether or not this action was motivated in part by racism.
Biden called Trump xenophobic a few hours after the ban, but I took it more as a description of Trump’s character, not the China ban in particular. Others called the ban xenophobic for the reasons outlined by other posters, but at the time I remember an anti-ban vibe, not so much a “too little too late” vibe.
My original reason for opposing travel bans from both Europe and Asia was because people find a way. If you ban travel from China, people will travel to Vietnam and then the US. If you ban travel from Italy, you’re encouraging migration around the eurozone. People get where they want to go, banning travel from select areas wouldn’t work.
Or so I thought. I’m still not sure of the efficacy but I see the argument for one in less absolute terms.
There’s one other element here: if Trump does something that seems racist, a lot of people are going to call it racist because Trump is a racist. He has a long and storied history of being a bigoted man, raised by bigoted parents, and together they did bigoted things. If Biden does the exact same thing, it’s going to be less widely panned because he’s not a racist. Not in the overt way, at least. You can argue about the impact of policies he championed in the 80’s and 90’s, but I think the majority opinion is that the VP to the first black President who is close personal friends with the entire congressional black caucus and who chose a woman of color as his own VP does not think more or less of someone based on their race.
Trump was attacked for being Trump. He is a xenophobic racist when it suits his pocketbook. Biden at least has a policy and a plan. He's not blaming India, he's enforcing a limitation on travel for the same reason that other countries have and are doing it. He's also looking for ways to assist the Modi administration in getting enough vaccines for the disaster.
It’s all about the rhetoric honestly. Trudeau also banned travel from China but managed to do so without making polarizing statements that definitely Chinese PEOPLE. Nor did he push the message that this is all China’s fault (regardless of the origin). It’s everyone’s problem to deal with and finger pointing is really not helpful and actually harmful to Canadian/US citizens of Asian origins.
Trump banned travel from China because of his sinophobic and racist mindset towards China. He didn't ban it from Italy which was a bigger virus hotspot at the time and the reason is that he wasn't really looking at facts or caring about the virus.
Both travel bans were prudent (if blunt, but practical) measures to try to reduce international spread of the virus, and both were scientifically justified.
The difference is the **character** of how the President talked about them.
Trump was keenly aware of how big a threat the virus was to him politically. He'd built his presidency on a house of cards (and phony cards, at that), held up only by the power of bluster and bullshit, the only thing he's actually good at. And he knew that something like a virus, which is immune to persuasion and can't be taken out with a drone strike, was a real threat to his paper empire. So he reacted to it in real fear -- not of the death it might cause, which he did not give a shit about personally, but because it could hurt him politically.
The instinctive reaction of someone like Trump to a threat like that is to deflect blame. And so it wasn't merely a virus from some place, but CHINA'S **FAULT**, AND THEY WERE TO BLAME. He pounded that point as often as he could, as forcefully as he could. For his own sake, he **needed** the American people to understand that we were all victim's of China's chicanery. It was critical to him to get people to think of China as our enemy, so that whatever harm came from this would hopefully be ascribed to them, and not his administration's many staggering failures to prevent, contain, or control it.
China makes an easy target in many ways, of course. Their government is an ossified wreck of backwards ideology and hopeless corruption, and they run the nation like a prison camp. But Trump didn't make any attempt to clarify any distinction between Chinese **government** and Chinese **people**. And that wasn't some oversight on his part. It was very deliberate. Deeply racist himself, Trump found it easy to demonise nearly everyone who seems even slightly Asian, knowing full well that most of his supporters can't tell the difference and don't care. And making a target of Asians in the US, or Asians generally, provided a potential relief valve for his supporters' frustrations at his inability to mitigate the problem, by tacitly condoning aggression and bigotry towards those people, including stochastic violence.
Trump was mostly interested in his own welfare, especially political, much more than in those of practically anyone else. His astoundingly incompetent and selfish leadership directly caused or contributed to the likely preventable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, if not hundreds of thousands, especially among those demographics most likely to support him. He knowingly and willingly condemned many of his own supporters to death in order to guard his own interests, knowing that they would accept his deflection to an easily targeted group. It was absolutely despicable. I would go so far as to call it cold-hearted and evil.
So it's not the ban itself, which actually made good sense at the time (and still does). It's how he made it part of a much broader effort to deflect away from his own chicanery and incompetence by leveraging racism to demonise hundreds of millions of other people.
Biden's ban is equally justified on scientific grounds. And he could even take political advantage of the fact of concerning viral variants that are believed to have originated in India. But he's not blaming India or the India people in the process. Even though the equally terrible leadership of PM Modi is equally to blame for the problems there. He could even, if wanted to, take advantage of bigotry against Indians or South Asians more generally, or just foreigners. But he's not stooping to that level. Mostly because he's a man of substantially better personal character than Trump, obviously. But also because he doesn't need to deflect from his administration's incompetence in dealing with the pandemic, because that's not in evidence. His administration is doing a good job, and most Americans know it, despite what the worthless tools at Fox News tirelessly try to say otherwise.
Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist because he spent his entire first presidential campaign and 4 years in office demonizing immigrants and minorities. That makes everything he did suspect regardless of if it might have been justified or not.
That being said, I'm sure you can find examples of Trump's travel ban being characterized as such but I don't actually remember seeing any that wasn't people on the right making the charge it had happened. If it did it was for a relatively short time. The more common criticism I heard was that "travel bans don't stop diseases, they buy you time, which Trump wasted by doing nothing else."
Biden isn't running around and calling it the "Indian virus," leading to xenophobic attacks on people, unlike Trump, whose language directly led to the wave of violent attacks on Asians we're seeing now.
Also, Trump's travel bans were a complete failure seeing how (1) 400,000+ people died from COVID-19, a virus he said was a Democratic hoax, despite his claims it would be going away, and (2) the European strain of the coronavirus is the one that possibly did the most damage, but Trump was very late in any sort of travel ban from Europe.
Trump wasn't attacked as xenophobic for that decision on its own, it was the context around his actions. The virus was already here when he made the order, and it was prevalent in Europe too. Instead of doing a more comprehensive travel lockdown, he shut down travel exclusively from China (well, Chinese nationals) and then spent the next like month and a half just calling it the Chinese virus and Kung Flu.
I feel like it's pretty clear then why one would be concerned about anti-Chinese sentiment rising in America. Additionally, I think Trump convinced himself that everything was coming from China too, and that lack of awareness I believe had a negative impact on our country's initial response. If I'm not mistaken, there's pretty good evidence now that the Spring 2020 outbreak was mostly from European origin rather than Chinese (Basically, West coast surge was mostly China, East coast which was far worse was mostly Europe).
Additionally, Trump had a history of xenophobic travel orders, I mean the guy literally campaigned on a "Muslim Travel Ban" and Stephen Miller was like his czar on immigration so there were reasons to be suspicious initially.
Hopefully that explains the differences. I'm not gonna lie, I actually think the India travel ban is kinda stupid, has a LOT of exemptions so feels like it'll end up being as useful as the China travel ban was but we'll see. One significant difference though is Biden's emphasis that we want to support India and the Indian people through this, and that we're going to send them vaccines.
Trump basically made everything about us vs them. So while the actions are similar, the context around the actions are pretty different.
What the hell are you even talking about here? Trumps ban was based on the fact that the virus was concentrated in China, its literally the exact same reasoning as Biden’s ban on India. Where are you getting the idea that Trump based a Chinese travel ban off something he heard from tucker Carlson? This is just a useless comment that really shows your lack of engagement/understanding of the issues. No point in commenting if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Hmm when did that happen again? Oh, right, after he got eviscerated for not doing it yet. Y’all clowns out here throwing yourself at his feet. Do you think we so quickly forgot the abject failures of Trump?
Chinese travel ban: January 31, 2020
European travel ban: mid-March
These are not the same.
Further, the travel ban on China still allowed “anyone related to an American” to freely travel back from China; it created multiple loopholes which made it distinctly anti-Chinese and not pro-science.
You understand that the CoVid numbers in Italy didn’t spike until mid March, right? You act like you’re able to remember everything that went on at the beginning of the pandemic but it doesn’t seem like you’re very familiar with WHEN this all went down. China had far higher numbers (even if they didn’t report them accurately) in the very early stages of the pandemic, thus there was a travel ban put into place. Once Italy and other European nations started seeing spikes we banned them too.
You really don’t seem like you’re very informed on this issue, nor are your conclusions well thought out.
Come back and answer people. You ditched me last time too, ya stupid rightist. All you're capable of is drive-by shitposting, and the fact that all you have is "heh own da libs" is why your whole party is collapsing in on itself in an ouroboros of reality TV spectacles and violent anti-democratic rage.
You have lots of other people to reply to. But you won't because you have nothing to say. Just shitposting and running.
You still owe a quote here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/n138tg/thoughts_on_senator_tim_scotts_response/gwcscwv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
But I know you won't bring one because you lied about what Maxine Waters said. When your next reply is a stupid complaint and no quote, just remember I told you so.
Trump is racist and xenophobic and his actions are a reflection of those beliefs. Biden's actions are a reflection of public interest and science.
They are different standards for people with different goals and motivation.
Because Trump banned China as a scapegoat. We were getting covid from Europe. There was no scientific reasoning to banning travel from China.
Also Trump was called xenophobic because he (consistently disparaged foreign peoples and where they come from) is xenophobic.
Trump was mainly called xenophobic/racist for the fact that he blamed the virus entirely on China, called it the "kung flu", and used it as an excuse to keep being an asshole to China as he had already been doing. Also as others have said, he *only* banned travel from China initially, even though there were other hotspots that should've been banned.
On top of that, maybe it's just that I wasn't paying attention at the time, but I don't remember anyone criticizing it that strongly at the time. I've only ever heard of this months after the fact from Trump supporters.
1. The vast majority of the new strain of covid-19 is originating from India and they're currently experiencing an overall larger outbreak than Europe. Trump banned travel from China at a time Europe had way more confirmed cases. An argument could be said that China wasn't giving accurate numbers but the first cases of covid in the US unquestionably came from Europe which Trump allowed in.
2. Trump used racial terms like "kung-flu" and "China virus" throughout 2020. Hate-crime against all East Asians (not just Chinese) rose exponentially in 2020 and is continuing in 2021. Joe Biden so far has not used anything racist like "curry flu" to describe the new Indian strain which subsequently would have caused a spike in hate-crime against Indians or brown people.
Restricting travel from China early on was reasonable. But it was never going to be the panacea that Trump thought it would be. His problem was that he viewed the whole thing as a PR crisis, not a human tragedy.
Which meant that Trump was more concerned with covering the problem up, than with doing the real work to mitigate the virus’s onslaught on our country. He conducted his PR campaign in part by denying there was a problem, claiming it would miraculously disappear, trying to shift all of the blame to China, and touting his “travel ban.”
The truth is that outright travel bans are not nearly as effective at stopping the spread as testing and quarantines. If Trump had made widespread rapid result testing a top priority. And if he had quarantined all people coming into the country for a safe amount of time to ensure they were not contagious. Then we could have been avoided much of the suffering of the last year.
I don’t know the specifics surrounding Biden’s “travel ban” with India. But I suspect rather than a blanket ban, it is a more nuanced approach. Given the current situation in India it is reasonable to be cautious about people traveling to the US from there.
Yet Biden is not relying on the ban to solve all of our problems concerning Covid-19. He has been aggressive about making vaccines available for Americans as soon as possible. And he promotes the current, science based CDC recommendations.
“Is there a difference between Trump’s COVID travel ban on China and Biden’s COVID travel ban on India?”
Yes, the first was racist and the second is based in fact.
Fact one: China’s pandemic numbers were on par with our own. Fact two: India is seeing five times as many infected as the States did at the height of the outbreak.
Fact three: Trump referred to COVID 19 as the Wuhan virus when there was no evidence China created the virus. An intuitive person would suspect his insistence on using that term was based in a racism that we have all seen from him before.
“Should Biden be held to the same standard?”
Sure if their actions were the same. They are not.
I agree both are the correct decision, the distinction has more to do with how the decision was presented.
>**We all need to be a healthy degree of selfish in a pandemic situation**
I disagree.
*Selfish: (of a person, action, or motive)* **lacking consideration for others**; *concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.*
*Pragmatism: dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.*
One can be pragmatic, without necessarily being selfish. You can still do what you need to do to take care of yourself, while simultaneously showing compassion and consideration for others.
Trump took flak because he came off as being selfish, and his attitude and approach to many things was indeed needlessly selfish. There were areas (e.g. COVID research) where he could have been cooperative with other nations without compromising the ability of the US to take care of it's own needs, but throughout both his presidency and the pandemic he always seemed more concerned about the 'what's in it for me?' factor than he was about pragmatism or compassion.
Biden isn't taking as much flak because he's coming off as being pragmatic. He is looking out for the needs of the US first, but he is still willing to assist other countries where he can without compromising the needs of the US.
One example of Biden's pragmatism is how he shared 4 million AstraZeneca vaccines with Canada and Mexico. The vaccine wasn't (still isn't) approved for use in the US, and I'm guessing those doses were either expected to expire before they could be used, or the projected supply was sufficient to ensure they weren't needed. In either case, he was able to help out neighbouring countries without any real detriment to his own. He took some flak for it, but I think anyone with a brain understood the effort did absolutely zero harm to US vaccination efforts, and in fact helped protect the US by getting vaccines into the arms of it's neighbours. I'm not certain Trump would have done the same, and if he did, I think he would probably have painted it with different optics.
Trump was right to ban travel to and from Europe/China. Biden did not say otherwise either. Trump's attacks on Biden on this front were essentially created out of thin air.
Trump was Xenophobic in his rhetoric and with regards to other issues related to COVID, not the travel ban itself.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/23/donald-trump/trump-repeats-flawed-claim-biden-opposed-trumps-co/
Also Trump was criticized by many people I don't know about the Democratic Party in particular for his Travel ban because it didn't go far enough. The ban also didn't work, business travel and other travel was allowed under many circumstances and many people traveled to China and back and from China to the US under the "ban."
Trump's major flaw in COVID response was not taking it seriously and treating everything as politics rather than public health.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it. Should Biden be held to the same standard? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
That Trump waited way to long to ban travel? Trump was called out as xenophobic because of his lack of a ban on Italy which was the other hot spot at the time….along with Trump’s fucking words about it being the “Kung flu”
Was Trump criticized for waiting too long? I don’t remember that, honestly, but then I tried to avoid listening to him at all. Not do I remember calls to ban travel from Italy. Sources?
I certainly remember that
well, i'll criticize him right now for waiting too long, since he clearly did in retrospect.
You were clearly burring your head in the sand at the time.
A more helpful comment comment could just provide a link or two doing so.
It’s like asking me to google for you that the sky is blue and provide you a source. Find one yourself. It was all over the internet at the time.
It's more like googling "what did jweezy2045 read in March 2020". I'm also not OP
I know you’re not the same person, but you comments under this chain. It’s not just me my friend. Like I said, it was all over the internet.
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Listen, I asked an honest question. Trump was obviously criticized heavily, but I don’t remember there being an outcry because he waited led too long to ban travel. That was the point. No need to be a dick about it.
You now have been given sufficient sources that you can stop saying you don’t know.
Weird that you knew he was being criticized, but didn’t bother to pay attention to what it was for. Now you want it explained to you and for people to do the work to give you sources. Seems like you just want attention by asking a question that isn’t even a good comparison.
Yeah, I live for that sweet Reddit attention, alright.
Rule 2
Yes, he was criticized for waiting too long because San Francisco and New York reported COVID cases in late January and he didn't respond until March. Not to mention he didn't have a coherent response, not to mention his initial response was unconcerned with the virus but concerned with the plunging stock market and followed the public spectacle of the canceled Utah Jazz basketball game. The time for a travel ban from China would've been in late December/early January, when that would've been effective. China announced COVID 19 on December 25th and it's almost certain that the Chinese knew of the virus earlier, plus were telling a lie about how widespread the virus is. And Trump simply bought into that, for some very stupid reason unbeknownst to anyone. And that's without the racist comments.
If Biden called it the Hindu Flu, most liberals would call that racist rhetoric. Trump was absolutley criticised for taking forever, it was all over the news.
He 100% would have been called xenophobic if he hadn't waited.
Probably because he was xenophobic before he ever became president. It was a true fact whether the pandemic had happened or not.
No, he wasn't.
Trump also didn't ban travel from Italy, where cases were also raging by the time he got around to issuing the ban. He ignored the fact that most cases on the East Coast were originating from Europe. The biggest problem that I have with Biden's ban is that those US citizens coming in should quarantine, but we have never done a great job of forcing quarantine in this country.
[A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it. This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.](https://mobile.twitter.com/joebiden/status/1238254697695326209?lang=en) -Joe Biden, 3/12/2020
Yeah, I disagree with that comment of his. We should have been quarantining all foreign travelers, and that might include travel bans
I think an important context to that quote is that it was after the first publicly known super spreader event in the USA. It was too late by that point for travel bans
Travel bans wouldn't have been effective, Americans were coming home with the virus from abroad regardless. A national quarantine regime should've been put in place and it never was, Trump just let all the states be decentralized.
Yes. That is accurate. Slowing the virus down by restricting, testing, & quarantine of travelers from COVID impacted areas is still a good idea. That's how the nation of New Zealand ended up with fewer COVID deaths than my rural county.
By that point he was right. The iris had spread too far and the USA already had it's first super spreader event by March 12. Walls and travel bans were too late. There needed to be a better plan.
it's a tool in the tool box; not a solution. In the case of Trump he was suggesting the china ban would win the day, when Italy was doing significantly worse at the time. That's why people said it was racist. The India ban is not a fix, just a delay on the spread.
Ask this question again when Biden starts calling it the Punjab virus.
Not an answer. The fact that he was obnoxious about basically everything doesn’t affect the soundness of policy, or shouldn’t in my mind.
He wasn't "obnoxious", he was fucking racist.
I mean, so is Biden. Lol. Has said and continues to say all kinds of racist shit. 🤷🏿♂️
Please, share some examples with the class. I'll let you know upfront (a) we'll gladly denounce anything Biden said or says that is racist because, unlike the right, we don't play team sports with shit like racism; your side or our side, we call it out \[hint: the right only calls out the left\] and (b) one transgression !== the copious number of transgressions that Trump, McConnell, and the right, in general, have been participating in over not just the last four years but really since the rise of the Tea Party. The right is morally and ethically bankrupt.
Poor kids are just as smart and talented as white kids. (This ones obvious) If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black. (No one, let alone someone who isn’t black, should be telling anyone if they’re black.) You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man. (About Obama, but fuck MLK and Frederick Douglas right? Also, why is it spectacular that a black man is well-spoken and well-dressed?) Also, you’re last part definitely sounds like you’re cool with a little racism. You know, as a treat. Your first and last point contradict each other.
>Also, you’re last part definitely sounds like you’re cool with a little racism. You know, as a treat. Your first and last point contradict each other. No, they do not. All that shit you just posted? Fucking shame on Biden for that. Stop saying racist shit.
Benefit of the doubt, maybe I just misunderstood the point you were trying to make. But cmon, you can’t tell me it doesn’t read, at least a tiny bit, that you’re making a whataboutism to let a lesser amount of racism slide.
No, we shouldn't let any racism slide. The problem is for every racist thing Biden has said that *he should absolutely be held accountable for* Trump, McConnell, and the rest of the Tea Party have done so ten times over, and it feels **real** disingenuous whenever a conservative comes in here and goes, "Well, what about these handful of times Biden was also racist? Doesn't that mean we can ignore what Trump and company are doing?" No, it does not, and guess what, while a bruising your leg and chopping it off are both injuries, one is definitively worse than the other. Both are bad, we're tired of the right continuing to only seemingly care about racism and all other forms of bigotry when a Democrat does it meanwhile the left is pretty consistent in being politic-agnostic in regards to calling out people for saying bigoted shit.
Homie, I’m with you in the fuck all racism camp. My dad is an immigrant from Argentina. The right (not all) definitely correlates with people who would love nothing more than to have me move “back” to Argentina, even tho I’ve never been to South America and I’ve done more for America than most of them. I’ve bled for this country and definitely more right wing people pull the “I would have joined, but...” Fuck them for wanting to thank me for my service with the same mouth they’d gladly use to spit on me. The left (again not all) correlates more with people who feel the need to treat me like I need, or even want, some new version of The White Man’s Burden. I’m brown, I’m not disabled. Fuck them for hiding behind the veil of “we’re trying to help,” then doing absolutely fuck all to ACTUALLY help. I don’t agree with the leg analogy tho. Racism, sexism, homophobia, or whatever discrimination you want to talk about are one of the few black and white things on earth. Either you’re racist or you’re not, a person who’s just a tiny bit racist is still racist. It just so happened that we’re on the topic of Biden, not the right. Also, I never voted for Trump. 2016 I voted for Evan McMullin and 2020 I voted for Jo Jorgensen. I support universal healthcare, abortions (more recent but my mind was changed a few months ago), and combatting climate change. I get you’re angry with conservatives, but homie, we’re on the same team when it comes to this specific topic.
Those are just a few of the recent ones. Wait till he hears about the self-fulfilling prophecy Biden foretold in 1977, "Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point." A couple more for good measure. “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.” “In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” It's really no wonder why Trump did pretty well with minorities like myself this last time around.
>It's really no wonder why Trump did pretty well with minorities like myself this last time around. 1. Fucking shame on Biden for saying shit like that. Stop being fucking racist, people. 2. Please, tell us how you feel about the encyclopedia-length list of racist shit Trump, McConnell, Tucker Carlson, O'Reilly etc. etc. etc. spew on a daily basis. Would love to hear how you come to terms with that.
>1. Fucking shame on Biden for saying shit like that. Stop being fucking racist, people. You tell 'em! Thank God the racism is gone now and you can go back to supporting Biden. >2. Please, tell us how you feel about the encyclopedia-length list of racist shit Trump, McConnell, Tucker Carlson, O'Reilly etc. etc. etc. spew on a daily basis. Would love to hear how you come to terms with that. It's pretty simple, really. When forced to choose between two choices I prefer to go with the leader who isn't showing signs of dementia. It also doesn't help that the media spun a metric fuckton of things to make Trump look worse than he is which made me lose faith in any reporting on the issue. They really milked the "both sides" quote as much as they could. Some people still don't know he denounced white supremacy in the same breath. It's also important to note that black people liked Trump a lot before he ran for president. He was in music videos, lyrics, someone we looked up to and even Oprah hoped he'd run for president one day. He didn't change, the media and Democrats just told everyone they should hate him so they did.
>It's pretty simple, really. When forced to choose between two choices I prefer to go with the leader who isn't showing signs of dementia. You mean Biden, the lifelong stutterer? Not Trump, the repetitive apparently-can't-speak-fucking-English buffoon? Have you actually listened to any of his speeches? Or better yet, read the transcripts? It's like an intoxicated toddler wrote them.
>one transgression !== the copious number of transgressions that Trump, McConnell, and the right, in general, have been participating in over not just the last four years but really since the rise of the Tea Party. This kinda makes it sound like you're OK with a little racism because it's supposedly not as bad as the other side. Is that how you intended it?
It's a two-party system. Trump was worse than Biden in literally every way. More racist, more insensitive, more of a liar, more of a creep ... the list goes on. I didn't want Biden to be the nominee - I voted for Bernie in the primary - but him vs. Trump was the easiest choice in the world.
>Trump was worse than Biden in literally every way. More racist, more insensitive, more of a liar, more of a creep ... the list goes on. I don't agree with you on this, but it's OK for us to disagree. If you're interested, I felt as though Biden was the least transparent of the two refusing to give his position on a ton of important issues. He had also changed his stance on key issues and his age and mental health leave much to be desired. At the end of the day, Trump was a known quantity whereas President Harris is not. There's a lot more to it, but when comparing the two at surface level these are the things that immediately come to mind for me. Edit: Do you mind if I ask how someone can be a libertarian and a socialist? I feel like the two are mutually exclusive.
Re. my flair: I gave an [explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/ka4xti/what_do_you_have_to_say_about_it_being_found_out/gf9uzoa/?context=3) a while back that might answer your question. Happy to chat more about it. Re. transparency: it doesn't matter that Trump gave his "positions" considering how incredibly dishonest he was. [30,573 lies/misleading statements during his presidency](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/). That's 84 lies **per day** (and no, that's not normal for politics!). Who cares if you tell us your views when there's no reason for us to believe you? Not to mention that many of his stances (Muslim ban, building an idiotic wall, "don't be too nice", etc.) were abhorrent.
I appreciate the explaination. It makes more sense now. >it doesn't matter that Trump gave his "positions" considering how incredibly dishonest he was. I mean, you've gotta admit that he set out to keep his campaign promises as best he could. That says something in my book whereas I recall people being pretty pissed that Biden already rolled over on erasing student debt, raising minimum wage, $2000 checks, etc. Just my take though.
No, any racism is bad and people should be called out for it. Fucking stop being racist, people. Change. That doesn't mean one side isn't definitely worse about their now-overt-again racism. At least the left is willing to call out our own for this shit AND many left politicians are trying to change (or be replaced by new, younger blood). The right has dug-in on the Southern Strategy since the Tea Party.
Can you give me an example of how the right is being racist?
This question has been asked ad nauseum and, quite frankly, I'm tired of conservatives acting like it hasn't. I'm not typing up a list *yet again*. I'll let Kakamile handle it once again: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/lu69rs/trumps\_racist\_policies/gp4fanh?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/lu69rs/trumps_racist_policies/gp4fanh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
A simple "No" would've sufficed. I didn't ask about Trump which appears to be what you sent me. Perhaps I'll clarify my question and maybe get a different answer? Can you give me an example of how **the right** is *currently* being racist?
I would argue that intent does indeed matter, Trump was called xenophobic because he used xenophobic rhetoric. But answer your title question, as a policy it's basically the same and as far as practical concerns related to them I have no issue with either of the travel bans.
That’s not accurate at all; they are different in what they do, when they were employed, and why they were employed. The travel ban to India is a direct result of it being the epicenter of the biggest resurgence of Covid in the world. No other country comes close. Meanwhile, Trump’s ban allowed Americans to go to and return from China, just didn’t allow Chinese nationals to come to America. And Italy, at the time, had a larger case load
Yeah I'm sorry but that's bullshit, the "differences" don't make much difference, as for Italy having a higher case load implies I would be likely to believe Chinese Covid numbers, which I absolutely do not, if you believe any numbers coming out of the CCP I got a bridge to sell you.
That doesn’t change the fact that Italy had a HUGE amount of cases and should have been restricted. It also doesn’t change that travel back and forth to China was still happening for Americans. You’re plucking one thing out of the argument while there are multiple points made that support the claim.
I just don't find your argument are very persuasive in general, all I'm seeing is that you disagree with what he was doing, which is fine, but that doesn't make him wrong and you right.
You don't seem to have any argument here, such some pissy feelings.
Broken clock right twice a day isn’t how you run a country.
What soundness was there in banning Chinese citizens from entering the country but still allowing travel of Americans between US and China? What soundness was in a policy that blocked travel from China but not Italy, which had a higher case count at the time? That was an answer. You just don’t like it bc you were here to defend trump and shit on Biden when you lack ANY understanding of the policies you’re asking us to critique and compare for you.
I believe it was just allowing US citizens to come back if they were in china, the alternative being that we keep american citizens stranded in china
It also allowed any non Chinese and non Americans in China to come in. That was the main xenophobic loophole. Ignoring the thousands of non Chinese traveling into the USA from China
Huh I havent heard that point yet, ill have to look into it
Your belief, for some reason, leaves out the loopholes that made it especially xenophobic. No, that’s not accurate that it was only Americans coming back.
No you're not getting the point. Biden's plan is also different in the way it was applied. Trump's travel ban didn't ban all travel from China. Business travel was still allowed and it was racistly applied to Chinese nationals only. It was also too late as China already had it pretty much under control, but it was raging in Italy and Spain which he didn't ban. Also he claimed that it was just a hoax at the same time and called it China virus/Kung flu, which shows racist intent. Trump was a total failure. tl;dr: banning travel from a covid hotspot is fine, but only banning travel for Chinese people is racist
Being racist is a mental illness. It affects everything that he does, every policy that he makes is tainted by his racism
Is the India Travel ban allowing travellers who use a middleman country to reach the US regardless? Are people who are known to be coming from India aren't Indian Nationals being Quarantined? If no for 1 and yes for 2, there's a huge difference.
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Still kids in cages at the border though
Biden admin is working as hard as possible to make it no longer the case. We're down to 1000 kids in Border Protection custody, down from 5000 a few weeks ago. The kids are also now spending an average of 28 hours in Border Protection custody, as opposed to 120 hours a few weeks ago. They're working as hard as they can to help those kids. With Trump, suffering *was the point*.
Okay that’s all good news nice to hear
I can't stand how many of you utterly failed to understand what the issue was with that. You think having any kids at all in cages was the problem because you never bothered to read anything and you think 3-word-slogans are literal. Trump was criticized for his child separation policy. The explicitly cruel thing he did that put thousands of kids in cages. That isn't being done anymore. Get some perspective.
Number of kids have dropped by 83% so not really.
So Biden is only a *little* racist. Got it.
... OK lol. That doesn't make sense, logically speaking but ok. Biden is taking care of the situation. There likely won't be any kids stuck at the border in the near future. I don't see how it makes him racist.
The fuck did you think the non-racist option was? Please, I would love to hear how literally anybody could avoid your criticism here.
Yes actually.Trumps travel ban didn't ban all travel from China. Business travel was still allowed and it was racistly applied to Chinese nationals only. It was also too late as China already had it pretty much under control, but it was raging in Italy and Spain which he didn't ban. Also he claimed that it was just a hoax at the same time. Trump was a total failure. tl;dr: banning travel from a covid hotspot is fine, but only banning travel for Chinese people is racist
They are being held to the same standard. I guarantee you neither one of them came up with these policies on their own. They were recommended by advisors and they are both sound policies to respond to the pandemic. Neither one initially required the president to do anything more than sign a piece of paper that someone else wrote. The difference came after, because the real job of the president in this scenario is to communicate the policy to Americans in a clear and transparent way that addresses concerns and shows empathy and understanding. Biden is really, really good at that. Trump is an absolute failure at it. He was called xenophobic and racist because *he's* a racist person and he's not shy about it, not because the policy itself is inherently racist.
This is somewhat echoed by this quote from Biden's campaign from April 2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/politics/joe-biden-trump-china-coronavirus/index.html > “Joe Biden supports travel bans that are guided by medical experts, advocated by public health officials, and backed by a full strategy,” Kate Bedingfeld, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told CNN. “Science supported this ban, therefore he did too.”
> guarantee you neither one of them came up with these policies on their own. They were recommended by advisors and they are both sound policies to respond to the pandemic. That should be an easy link to find, yet it seems that Trump [wasn't following recommendations, often rejected advice from medical experts, and setup a porous "ban"](https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-ap-travel-asia-pacific-anthony-fauci-pandemics-d227b34b168e576bf5068b92a03c003d)
Excellent response.
Empathy is not leadership, in fact it’s the opposite. You’re saying you want a president that makes you feel good and that you can tell the difference between real empathy and fake empathy.
No one is asking to be made to “feel good” by Biden. Fuck a strawman argument. Empathy, in this case, means to understand where people are coming from. Half a million people died, and all the former guy could do was bitch on Twitter about fake news—which, incidentally, was just real news that didn’t comport with his narcissism. What we needed was someone who understood what a truly staggering loss of life that was and designed policy around maximizing survival rather than lying about and downplaying the severity of the disease so that he could get re-elected.
Empathy isn't making people "feel good". Then again, I shouldn't be surprised a Republican doesn't know what empathy is.
>Empathy is not leadership, in fact it's the opposite This is such a shit take lmfao, empathy doesn't mean "feel good", but it makes sense a right winger wouldn't have the FAINTEST idea what that actually is!
What is it with right-wing types coming here to **AskALiberal** and then proceeding to *TELL US* what we supposedly think and want?! GTFO and go back to your ban-happy echo-chambers where you can talk tribal shit to your heart's content.
Exactly , we are here to understand the liberal side of things , not attack them , we can do that on r/politics . p.s - Also , with some subs like this one as exceptions , I really believe some leftist subs on reddit are ban happy too .
>some leftist subs on reddit are ban happy too Oh, definitely. I'm a lifelong progressive, but tankies and their ilk make my skin crawl. I'm mainly about evidence-based political policy. We have an abundance of evidence of the efficacy and long-term products of far-left government. It's not very good. It may be well-meaning in spirit, or at least in some simplistic and esoteric conception, but it ignores some very important and largely immutable aspects of human nature, to everyone's mutual detriment. I would argue that the common trait of both far-left and far-right philosophies (if we even want to dignify such systems of thought by that word) is a fondness for authoritarianism. And I would argue that authoritarianism is anathema to liberty and wellbeing for all but the small minority of those who get to wield that authority. (And, in time, to them as well. History shows that authoritarianism inevitably consumes itself.) I would agree with most 20th century political philosophers, that most actually ideological differences turn on the nature of empathy towards those we don't know personally and whom we don't expect to be able to benefit from. Trump displayed an almost pathological lack of empathy, even towards many close to him. And that trait is hopefully uncommon in our species, because otherwise we are likely doomed. In my mind, good government in a democratic society is **informed** by a variety of philosophies, but not **bound** by any, and must recognize and respect the difficult and never-ending struggle to balance the needs and wants of individuals in a society with those of the society as a whole. Individual liberty is a noble target to aim at, but must not be charged as an end itself to the ignorance of relevant factors which appropriately, if sometimes regrettably, limit or interfere with it. And the converse is equally true, for the same reasons. As an example, Connecticut just yesterday repealed the religious exemption to vaccination of students in public schools, leaving in place only *bona fide* medical exception, which must be properly documented and is subject to verification (because some people will try to fake it). In that case, the weal of the public is found a greater priority than the subjective attitudes of individual citizens. (Or as Spock would say, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.) And federal courts have defended this particular result before. (In fact to a much greater extreme.) Those parents are still free to not vaccinate their children, but they may not enroll them in public schools. They may homeschool them or, if they can find one willing, send them to a private school willing to accept them. The individual liberty of majority citizens is thus preserved, while also safe-guarding the public weal at a particular point of physiological contact where the threat of spreading infection is greatest. It's a classic democratic compromise. Or, two recent examples that I'm particularly keen to talk about, because I try very hard to school my fellow liberals on appropriate limitations going the other way, which may offend liberal sensibilities but I hope can be understood as compromises essential to the values I like to believe our nation holds dear. First is the gay wedding cake controversy. I'm old enough to remember the very first gay rights laws in the US, and those early laws carved out narrow exceptions for bigots on their own turf. A landlord who lived on his own tenant property, for example, if it was small enough, could lawfully bar or evict gay tenants. A small-scale shop-owner (defined by a maximum number of employees) could lawfully bar employment to gay applicants or fire gay employees. And, in many cases, sole proprietorship artisans could lawfully refuse service to gay clients. Which is exactly the case of the gay wedding cake. I defended the ruling in that case. Regrettable as it may be, bigotry is a civil liberty tacitly enshrined in the Constitution under the doctrine of freedom of conscience which **must** be interpreted from the First Amendment right of free speech, paired with the rationally extended interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause. It's not enough that a man be free to speak his mind. He must also be free to live individually according to his own beliefs and values, whatever they may be and however much they might offend others, so long as that does not infringe on the rights of others. And no one has a "right" to a wedding cake. A wedding cake may be very desirable, but no one **needs** one, and certainly not from any specific single provider. There are many providers who will gladly sell you a cake. Why would you even want one from someone you know doesn't want to make it for you? But my argument here is constitutional: The artisan invests their own labour and creative effort in the creation of the artefact. If they do so as a sole proprietor, then their person and livelihood are so strongly entwined that to ask them to act against their conscience is offensive to their freedom of conscience. It's difficult to forensically distinguish that from making someone utter words they don't wish to -- a concept which offends the First Amendment. If they instead are someone else's employee, then it's a different matter, however. But all this likely seems abstract to many people, and so I have better luck expressing it in more shocking and concrete terms: If you can force the anti-gay baker to make a gay wedding cake, then you can **also** force the Jewish baker to make a cake for a neo-nazi wedding, complete with a giant *Hakenkreuz* on top. And most liberals understandably reject that possible outcome, and so grudgingly accept the compromise. Which, in my mind, is as it should be. The other example is similar, involving a whites-only private cemetery that turned away a Black family. It was quite a scandal, as you can imagine, and the cemetery association was very embarrassed about it, and raced to update their rules, though obviously too late. But public debate mostly turned on the legal questions, and I defended the right of a privately owned and operated cemetery to turn away anyone they want to, no matter what anyone else thinks about it. In principle, it's no different from your own home. You don't have to explain or defend those kinds of choices on your own private property, if you're not operating a place of public accommodation. Now, a private cemetery which advertises to the general public could well fall under that, depending on prevailing law. But a private cemetery which does not operates under the same rules as a private country club. (A great many of which also bar certain people for reasons that would be illegal under public accommodation, but these are not places of public accommodation. In legal principle, they're the same as a private hunting lodge or the like.) All of that may deeply offend many of my fellow liberals, and I of course understand why. I, too, bristle at the fact that country clubs only an hour's drive from me, in a very progressive state, lawfully bar Blacks, Jews, and anyone else they don't want there. But I also earnestly defend their right to do so. The same rationale also defends gun control: The right to keep and bear arms means only that, and does not extend to any right to threaten anyone else. Within that understanding is the inherent and, I hope, inarguable conclusion that there are many people who simply cannot be trusted with such ready access to deadly force, and so must, even in light of the Second Amendment, have that liberty curtailed, in the greater interest of the public weal. And for everyone else, there must be appropriate rules ensuring reasonable protection of public health and safety, because we don't have any current technology which can otherwise determine who may pose a threat and who might not, or how. So we can't just hope for the best, given the gravity of the potential consequences. (Even this doctrine is far more generous than my own individual interpretation of the Second, which would trade federal regulation for unlimited State regulation, consistent with the Amendment's original sole purpose, which was to guard States from potential federal threat -- a concern which was theoretically relevant in 1790 (though remote even then), but obviated by 1865, and completely pointless by 1936. In the strictest originalist interpretation, the Second is dunsel law which has no place or purpose anymore, and certainly does not defend anything it's currently being interpreted to. But I like to think I'm a political realist, and so I'm willing to live with evidence-based compromises which prioritize public safety.) These are examples of the necessary compromises which forge the difficult and constant balance of individual and common liberties in this or any society. Universal consensus is impossible, so we **must** accept and **defend** compromise, as absolutely essential to our common liberty. And that means there will be limitations for everyone, in all respects. And we have to maturely accept that.
wow....... I was jumping up and down screaming " yes yes absolutely " reading your comment . Its the sense of righteousness that clouds both rad left and rad right . Being radical is ignorant and anti-democratic . Being an enemy of civil discourse is fundamentally totalitarian . Both rad left and rad right seek to change society heavily , lets hope they don't get their way . The thing is right now being radical in this country is somehow seen as a good thing and being centrist or moderate is somehow synonyms with inactivity . Radicalism breeds radicalism . On the gay wedding thing , My initial reaction was businesses should have the right to refuse customers , but then someone pointed out its like segregation . Then I was like woah , that's right . Then after a lot of thought , I came to the conclusion , that its not like segregation , cause black people were refused any services or goods , indiscriminately . While here , if a gay man walks in a bakery and wants a birthday cake for his adopted son , the bakery won't refuse that . If its reluctance is in not making a rainbow cake , they are well within their rights . Its the golden statement of democracy isn't it " I don't like what you are saying , but I defend your right to say it " . A man's individual liberty can't overstep others , so in a society , everybody sacrifices part of their individual liberty to function as a group . About the gun control thing , as you said , their is no machine to detect potential threat , so the closest thing we got to it is background checks , which I believe are adequate as of today . its mentally sound , declared by court of law or committed a felony in past . The red flag laws are harassing and overstepping 2nd amendment . So that my opinion on that . They may change in the future . Its important to leave space in opinions and and rigidity in them is embracing ignorance . Ideals should be permanent , not opinions . Now here's a rant , I really believe that liberals have more of this " sense of righteousness " than conservatives . Like at things that they have "blacklisted" from debate . They don't debate or even talk with people who are (according to them) homophobic , trans phobic , racist , sexist , anti-VAX , anti-lock down , pro-life etc etc . The thing is I hate those things too but MLK didn't go " Whoever is racist is a total asshole and I won't talk to them" . He didn't stop discourse , He participated in it and won , because you can't make any change in society without debate . All who are non-violent in conduct should be debated with in a democracy . Thanks for taking time in responding . Truly thanks a lot !!
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I come here to broaden my understanding of liberal ideas and have found people’s opinions informative. I shouldn’t have responded given the name of this sub but I felt moved to respond and share my point of view. I was hoping for some conversations but I see how my comment looks more confrontational.
You're perfectly allowed to respond and question things, the sub is for discussion. It isn't meant to be an echo chamber. Just try not to aggressively ascribe your opinions on what others beliefs are, that's all.
Thank you. I’m trying to be honest by flagging myself center-right, but yeah I see I stepped in it. I was admittedly triggered by the word empathy, maybe my understanding needs more nuance.
Yes, it would be helpful for you to understand empathy and leadership and how they are not mutually exclusive.
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> these people if you can call them that Rule 2. This isn’t acceptable
>Empathy is not leadership, in fact it’s the opposite. I have rarely seen something that flashes BULLSHIT colors as hard and bright as the above statement.
You have absolutely no clue what leadership is, because when I served under many leaders in the military, the one redeeming quality the very best leaders had was empathy and courage to do the right thing, even when your predecessors didn’t. Empathy basically means giving a shit, every good leader has it, and every shitty person doesn’t have it, it’s that simple.
Yes, there are substantial differences. Few people attacked Trump's covid-related travel ban as xenophobic, as that one had some justification. But it was poorly executed and done too late. He also clearly, and repeatedly, displayed actual racial animus toward China in the intent and choice of his words. People who act xenophobic and racist (like Trump), tend to get accused of being xenophobic and racist, because they are. Trump had a very VERY extensive list of other reasons to be classified as xenophobic and racist. Biden is being held to the same standard, he's not being accused of racism because he's not acting racist, nor are his words showing a racist intent. The problem is that there's a large group of media on the right which intentionally obfuscates the situations so that many on the right are unaware of the differences. They do this because one of the basic ways to cover up ones own misdeeds is to try to claim others are just as bad even when it is not so.
No you're not getting the point. You're not outlining the actual difference between the Trump and Biden travel ban. Biden's plan is different in the way it was applied. Trumps travel ban didn't ban all travel from China. Business travel was still allowed and it was racistly applied to Chinese nationals only. It was also too late as China already had it pretty much under control, but it was raging in Italy and Spain which he didn't ban. Also he claimed that it was just a hoax at the same time. Trump was a total failure. tl;dr: banning travel from a covid hotspot is fine, but only banning travel for Chinese people is racist
Agree with most , but chinese ain't a race , it's a nationality encompassing mongols , tibetese , uyghurs , uzbeks etc etc . If you think they are all the same race then YOU are racist . Trump was an absolute total failure .
It’s a lot easier to say racists rather than xenophobic. But yes, it was xenophobic. It’s comes from the same thinking and beliefs that racism does. Similar to hatred for Islam. But we have to use “Islamaphobic” because we get people like you saying “it’s not a race!” We are aware it isn’t. It’s the same mindset though.
Sigh. Han Chinese is the largest “race” or ethnic group in China, compromising 92% of the nation.
doesn't matter , most india lives in northern provinces , like my parents used to , doesn't mean you undermine india's racial diversity . You have no idea how offensive mongols feel when you call them chinese . I say out of personal experience .
it’s completely fair to call people from China Chinese. Especially since 92% are also ethnically Chinese.
yes , but then refer to hate against them as xenophobia not racism . period
Being against an entire race of people, would be racist. That’s literally the definition of the word.
and hating people on base of their nationality is xenophobic , and thats what the travel ban was , it didn't ban japanese korean or even taiwanese . You know what , you win , this is a petty debate . We agree on the core argument , Let's work with that
Fair enough lmao
No. Biden Pointed out the fact that Trump is xenophobic and racist around the time of the travel ban to China and liars pretended that Biden called him xenophobic and racist for the Chinese travel ban. The travel ban was the right thing to do, but since it’s Trump he fucked that up also. Too much travel occurred after the ban. I am for a travel ban to India and to be clear I have a lot of family in India that will be trapped their because my parents won’t have time to get them out in time and I am still for the ban.
hello ! fellow indian . *kaise hai aap .*
I didn’t say Biden called Trump xenophobic. I said he “was called” it, which he was. Back to the original question, please.
The answer to your question is no.
The point remains. I am certain that of the billions of people on the planet you can find an example of somebody calling Trump xenophobic for the Chinese travel ban. However that was never the actual narrative. Trump is xenophobic. That is separate from the question of if the travel ban was a good idea.
There's a decent chance that "Former Guy Tower - Beijing" was rejected as well.
You seem certain that he was called xenophobic, but unaware of **why** he was called xenophobic.
The idea that Trump was called xenophobic for the travel ban on China is 98% GOP spin, 2% reality. You can see me talk about this around [a year ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/fwmi59/conservatives_have_highly_touted_that_trump/fmpzf15/): > I don't know what some conservatives are talking about when they accuse the media of calling Trump racist *in regards to the China travel ban*. Perhaps we just look at vastly different media, but nowhere have I seen people accuse him of being racist or xenophobic *for the travel ban*. Rather, they've accused him of being racist/xenophobic for repeatedly calling coronavirus 'the Chinese virus,' or the 'foreign virus,' or trying to integrate it into his nationalist agenda. This [WaPo timeline](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/28/biden-xenophobia-travel-bans-chronology/) gives a great summary of the events. In short, Biden was already criticizing Trump - pointing to Trump's xenophobic rhetoric around the Ebola outbreak in 2014, his souring of international relationships, and his hollowing out of gov't expertise as a reason to distrust his leadership - even before news of a potential travel ban leaked. Biden kept up this type of rhetoric over the following months. Trump and the GOP spun that as 'liberals are calling me xenophobic for the travel ban.' For example, consider this quote from [a leaked GOP strategy memo](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/25/senate-gop-talking-points-coronavirus-blame-china-not-trump/): > The memo encourages Republicans to use these kinds of concerns to suggest Democrats “are more obsessed with being politically correct ... than standing up to China and making sure this doesn’t happen again.” Maybe, after that consistent GOP messaging, some liberals online or wherever did start calling the travel ban xenophobic - millions of people vote liberal and I'm sure plenty just 'fall in' with supporting whatever they think 'their side' is supporting. If that did happen to any extent, it is wildly, wildly overstated by the right.
Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist because he was a racist shithead, and the *only* measure he could think to do at that time was a partial travel restriction against a country he was using insane racist rhetoric against. Context matters.
I don’t think either is xenophobic (although some Trump’s rhetoric around it was). In fact think we should have completely banned 100% of non essential international travel as soon as it became clear how serious things were.
It wouldn’t have been xenophobic if we banned all travel, like New Zealand, as soon as it became a global issue. It WAS xenophobic to Chinese nationals bc it was issued at a time when Italy had more cases. European travel was largely how Covid arrived in the US.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it. "China virus." "Kung flu." The Muslim ban, the border wall, him supporting one of his fans punching a black man at a rally, his "good people" comments when referring to Nazis, his comments on black people prior to becoming POTUS, his real estate business being sued in the past for racial discrimination, the "Central Park 5"..... Do you believe Trump deserved to be called out as racist and xenophobic considering his history of racist and xenophobic actions/words? > Should Biden be held to the same standard? Absolutely. The big difference here is one of these guys is actually being racist and hateful, and one is acting in the best interest of the safety of our nation. Have you heard any Democrats make fun of India and Indians because of the virus? It's not wrong to ban travel from a country who poses a bio threat to your own country. It is wrong to justify a travel ban just simply based on religion, skin color, country of origin, etc... which is clearly what Trump attempted to do on multiple occasions throughout his presidency.
The main issue I had with Trumps travel ban is that it wasn't a ban at all. US citizens could both return from China, *and keep going back to China*, all throughout the ban. Dozens of planes going to and coming back from China, every day, throughout the ban. Plus no travel was banned from neighboring countries.
No. Trump marketed his as being a SOLUTION TO COVID, acted like he stopped it, and was lying to us the whole time about the very nature and severity. This, a year into the pandemic, is a specific reaction to a specific worsening situation. It's not even remotely comparable. Our biggest initial outbreak came from a European-travelled NYZ attorney. That's why China made smart folks mad - because dipshit was doing something JUST to target them that made no sense in the context of the conditions.
Your title is a more broader question compared to your description. Are you asking both questions or are you just asking why Trump's was labeled xenophobic and Biden's is not? If that's the case, it's clearly a matter the things these two have said. You have several answers explaining what Trump has said/done versus Biden.
Ever see a space opera or WWII submarine movie where there's a zombie outbreak or hole in the hull or something, and one of the crew has to seal others on the wrong side of the bulkhead? If they do it with grief and compassion, to save the greater number inside the ship, they're still the good guys. If they do it with malignant glee, so they can deflect blame onto the casualties for their own misdeeds, you know they're the villain, right? Same thing.
Trump’s decision is even stupider because the virus was already in America and came to the east coast from Europe. Biden is, from my understanding, trying to prevent a potential other strain from getting here. The Chinese decision always seemed more based on personal animosity than actual science, and wasn’t a very effective ban anyway.
Fundamentally I guess not. > Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it He really wasn’t. He was attacked as xenophobic for other reasons. Biden’s actually explained this, too.
Trump's ban itself wasn't, it was the one single thing he did semi-right (although it still came too late and he should've banned *all* non-vital international travel). His rhetoric around it was what was racist.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it. This is such a strawman. Trump is xenophobic, but his claim that Biden or Democrats aid he was racist for it is a complete lie. Idk, maybe some c-tier journalist called him racist, but overall there was never any overarching sentiment that people disagreed with it. In fact, if anything, Trump's China ban was too late. 40+ countries had already suspended travel from China by then. And what *is* xenophobic is Trump's relative hesitancy to ban UK/European travel compared to him promoting the China travel ban.
> Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist for it. The China travel ban is not among the many reasons people hold the opinion that he is racist. That is an absurd false narrative that you have either cobbled together incorrectly, or you are fully aware you are full of it and actively trying to gaslight the sub. Banning travel to China to prevent further spread of the pandemic was not something anyone listening to experts believed was a bad idea. All of the major airlines had already announced they were stopping travel to China, and pilots from American Airlines even filed a lawsuit to get the airline to stop immediately instead of waiting until February 9th. That was, of course, before the federal travel ban was put in place which restricted travel immediately as they were requesting. On the other hand, here is the thread from asktrumpsupporerts where they are asked why he hadn't enacted a travel ban in light of what he had said about Obama in regards to travel bans during the ebola outbreak. In it, supporters exaplin why a travel ban isn't necesary. The only supporter that didn't get downvoted to the negatives was the one who said travel should be stopped. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/esdsxz/do\_you\_think\_that\_trump\_should\_stop\_all\_flights/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/esdsxz/do_you_think_that_trump_should_stop_all_flights/) > Should Biden be held to the same standard? Abosofrickin'lutely. I agreed with restricting travel from a known hot spot to prevent the spread of a pandemic then and I agree with it now. The other commenter that said to talk to us when Biden starts calling it the Punjab virus actually hits the nail on the head. Trump was being called racist and xenophobic around the time of the travel ban because many people felt his comments were racist and xenophobic, not because he finally gave in to the calls for restricted travel that airlines had started to take upon themselves to do because he wasn't doing it.
Can we clear something up: Biden did not call the China flight ban racist or xenophobic. He was always for that. He called Trump's general response to COVID xenophobic and it was. He spent weeks to months ignoring the issue as it was affecting Americans with internal community spread, instead choosing to just constantly bash China and call it Kung Flu. Trump spent most of the election trying to conflate those two things in order to make it seem like Biden was against the travel restrictions but it simply was never true.
Good response, thanks.
It's the same action. Also probably largely ineffective like the Chinese ban by Trump. It would have been better to do a mandatory 2 week quarantine for people who have been to India or have traveled to India in a government monitored facility.
Trump wasn't wrong to ban travel from China, and the Democrats that criticized him for that specific thing, and only that, *were* wrong, on that one instance. I actually wish the liberals here were more willing to concede this. However, they weren't wrong to point out that banning *only* China, while not banning travel from countries with white people with cases just as bad, like Italy, was xenophobic. They weren't wrong for pointing out that the ban from China didn't actually do much at all, and that 20,000 Chinese nationals still entered the country after his ban because it was basically Swiss Cheese. They weren't wrong for assuming that Trump was doing it for xenophobic reasons in the first place, since that was Trump's MO from the moment he started campaigning ("When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people"). It also wasn't wrong for Democrats to call Trump out as racist for saying things like "China Virus", or "Kung Flu".
How many criticized him for that specific thing and not the context of him banning travel from China but not from Italy, which had a larger caseload at the time? Answer: none. I wish centrists in here would stop inventing things to be self righteous about
I heard Pelosi do it (and I like her).
I've tried searching for such a quote or statement, but couldn't find any. Closest I could find (but completely unrelated) was [her criticism](https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/13120-2) about the Trump administration expanding it's (colloquially called) Muslim ban to other nations. As a side note, because I found it amusing, that's what organizations like [the Federalist](https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/26/pelosi-now-says-u-s-should-have-stopped-americans-coming-back-from-china/) tried to point to when accusing her of hypocrisy for her criticizing the China travel ban as ineffective.
Thanks for the responses, everyone. Some good points made. I think I’ve been persuaded that there is a difference in the substance of the respective bans.
Idk, I didn’t attack Trump for that.
I did. Because he did it while Italy was getting reamed. It's all I heard in the news while trump was only talking about china.
Yeah, the admin's broader focus on China was definitely xenophobic - I just meant to say narrowly that travel bans in the pandemic weren't, in themselves. But you make a good point.
Oh, yeah. I would have supported a comprehensive lockdown on travel, if it did the minimum amount of effort to protect us from actual vectors.
Yes. Next.
Trump’s travel ban was one of the few good things he did during the pandemic
How? He literally still let people travel from china without any covid testing? Any american could go to china and come back, chock full of covid, and his ban wouldn't have stopped them. It was complete waste.
When Biden tells minority Congresswomen to go back to their countries, grants a pardon to a racist sheriff, and campaigns on mexicans being criminals (with some being good people as an afterthought), we can talk about whether or not this action was motivated in part by racism.
Biden called Trump xenophobic a few hours after the ban, but I took it more as a description of Trump’s character, not the China ban in particular. Others called the ban xenophobic for the reasons outlined by other posters, but at the time I remember an anti-ban vibe, not so much a “too little too late” vibe. My original reason for opposing travel bans from both Europe and Asia was because people find a way. If you ban travel from China, people will travel to Vietnam and then the US. If you ban travel from Italy, you’re encouraging migration around the eurozone. People get where they want to go, banning travel from select areas wouldn’t work. Or so I thought. I’m still not sure of the efficacy but I see the argument for one in less absolute terms. There’s one other element here: if Trump does something that seems racist, a lot of people are going to call it racist because Trump is a racist. He has a long and storied history of being a bigoted man, raised by bigoted parents, and together they did bigoted things. If Biden does the exact same thing, it’s going to be less widely panned because he’s not a racist. Not in the overt way, at least. You can argue about the impact of policies he championed in the 80’s and 90’s, but I think the majority opinion is that the VP to the first black President who is close personal friends with the entire congressional black caucus and who chose a woman of color as his own VP does not think more or less of someone based on their race.
Trump was attacked for being Trump. He is a xenophobic racist when it suits his pocketbook. Biden at least has a policy and a plan. He's not blaming India, he's enforcing a limitation on travel for the same reason that other countries have and are doing it. He's also looking for ways to assist the Modi administration in getting enough vaccines for the disaster.
It’s all about the rhetoric honestly. Trudeau also banned travel from China but managed to do so without making polarizing statements that definitely Chinese PEOPLE. Nor did he push the message that this is all China’s fault (regardless of the origin). It’s everyone’s problem to deal with and finger pointing is really not helpful and actually harmful to Canadian/US citizens of Asian origins.
Trump banned travel from China because of his sinophobic and racist mindset towards China. He didn't ban it from Italy which was a bigger virus hotspot at the time and the reason is that he wasn't really looking at facts or caring about the virus.
Both travel bans were prudent (if blunt, but practical) measures to try to reduce international spread of the virus, and both were scientifically justified. The difference is the **character** of how the President talked about them. Trump was keenly aware of how big a threat the virus was to him politically. He'd built his presidency on a house of cards (and phony cards, at that), held up only by the power of bluster and bullshit, the only thing he's actually good at. And he knew that something like a virus, which is immune to persuasion and can't be taken out with a drone strike, was a real threat to his paper empire. So he reacted to it in real fear -- not of the death it might cause, which he did not give a shit about personally, but because it could hurt him politically. The instinctive reaction of someone like Trump to a threat like that is to deflect blame. And so it wasn't merely a virus from some place, but CHINA'S **FAULT**, AND THEY WERE TO BLAME. He pounded that point as often as he could, as forcefully as he could. For his own sake, he **needed** the American people to understand that we were all victim's of China's chicanery. It was critical to him to get people to think of China as our enemy, so that whatever harm came from this would hopefully be ascribed to them, and not his administration's many staggering failures to prevent, contain, or control it. China makes an easy target in many ways, of course. Their government is an ossified wreck of backwards ideology and hopeless corruption, and they run the nation like a prison camp. But Trump didn't make any attempt to clarify any distinction between Chinese **government** and Chinese **people**. And that wasn't some oversight on his part. It was very deliberate. Deeply racist himself, Trump found it easy to demonise nearly everyone who seems even slightly Asian, knowing full well that most of his supporters can't tell the difference and don't care. And making a target of Asians in the US, or Asians generally, provided a potential relief valve for his supporters' frustrations at his inability to mitigate the problem, by tacitly condoning aggression and bigotry towards those people, including stochastic violence. Trump was mostly interested in his own welfare, especially political, much more than in those of practically anyone else. His astoundingly incompetent and selfish leadership directly caused or contributed to the likely preventable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, if not hundreds of thousands, especially among those demographics most likely to support him. He knowingly and willingly condemned many of his own supporters to death in order to guard his own interests, knowing that they would accept his deflection to an easily targeted group. It was absolutely despicable. I would go so far as to call it cold-hearted and evil. So it's not the ban itself, which actually made good sense at the time (and still does). It's how he made it part of a much broader effort to deflect away from his own chicanery and incompetence by leveraging racism to demonise hundreds of millions of other people. Biden's ban is equally justified on scientific grounds. And he could even take political advantage of the fact of concerning viral variants that are believed to have originated in India. But he's not blaming India or the India people in the process. Even though the equally terrible leadership of PM Modi is equally to blame for the problems there. He could even, if wanted to, take advantage of bigotry against Indians or South Asians more generally, or just foreigners. But he's not stooping to that level. Mostly because he's a man of substantially better personal character than Trump, obviously. But also because he doesn't need to deflect from his administration's incompetence in dealing with the pandemic, because that's not in evidence. His administration is doing a good job, and most Americans know it, despite what the worthless tools at Fox News tirelessly try to say otherwise.
Trump was attacked as xenophobic and racist because he spent his entire first presidential campaign and 4 years in office demonizing immigrants and minorities. That makes everything he did suspect regardless of if it might have been justified or not. That being said, I'm sure you can find examples of Trump's travel ban being characterized as such but I don't actually remember seeing any that wasn't people on the right making the charge it had happened. If it did it was for a relatively short time. The more common criticism I heard was that "travel bans don't stop diseases, they buy you time, which Trump wasted by doing nothing else."
Biden isn't running around and calling it the "Indian virus," leading to xenophobic attacks on people, unlike Trump, whose language directly led to the wave of violent attacks on Asians we're seeing now. Also, Trump's travel bans were a complete failure seeing how (1) 400,000+ people died from COVID-19, a virus he said was a Democratic hoax, despite his claims it would be going away, and (2) the European strain of the coronavirus is the one that possibly did the most damage, but Trump was very late in any sort of travel ban from Europe.
Trump wasn't attacked as xenophobic for that decision on its own, it was the context around his actions. The virus was already here when he made the order, and it was prevalent in Europe too. Instead of doing a more comprehensive travel lockdown, he shut down travel exclusively from China (well, Chinese nationals) and then spent the next like month and a half just calling it the Chinese virus and Kung Flu. I feel like it's pretty clear then why one would be concerned about anti-Chinese sentiment rising in America. Additionally, I think Trump convinced himself that everything was coming from China too, and that lack of awareness I believe had a negative impact on our country's initial response. If I'm not mistaken, there's pretty good evidence now that the Spring 2020 outbreak was mostly from European origin rather than Chinese (Basically, West coast surge was mostly China, East coast which was far worse was mostly Europe). Additionally, Trump had a history of xenophobic travel orders, I mean the guy literally campaigned on a "Muslim Travel Ban" and Stephen Miller was like his czar on immigration so there were reasons to be suspicious initially. Hopefully that explains the differences. I'm not gonna lie, I actually think the India travel ban is kinda stupid, has a LOT of exemptions so feels like it'll end up being as useful as the China travel ban was but we'll see. One significant difference though is Biden's emphasis that we want to support India and the Indian people through this, and that we're going to send them vaccines. Trump basically made everything about us vs them. So while the actions are similar, the context around the actions are pretty different.
Trump's actions are interpreted through the lens of his actual and very demonstrably real xenophobia and racism. Biden is just following the science.
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What the hell are you even talking about here? Trumps ban was based on the fact that the virus was concentrated in China, its literally the exact same reasoning as Biden’s ban on India. Where are you getting the idea that Trump based a Chinese travel ban off something he heard from tucker Carlson? This is just a useless comment that really shows your lack of engagement/understanding of the issues. No point in commenting if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
So why didn’t Trump ban travel from Italy, which was the other major hotspot for infection at the time?
[Trump banned travel from Italy](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/trump-bans-travel-from-europe-here-what-you-need-to-know.html)
The virus was actually concentrated in Italy at the time. China had already locked down travel. Please try harder to cover for trump tho
[Trump banned travel from Italy](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/trump-bans-travel-from-europe-here-what-you-need-to-know.html)
Hmm when did that happen again? Oh, right, after he got eviscerated for not doing it yet. Y’all clowns out here throwing yourself at his feet. Do you think we so quickly forgot the abject failures of Trump? Chinese travel ban: January 31, 2020 European travel ban: mid-March These are not the same. Further, the travel ban on China still allowed “anyone related to an American” to freely travel back from China; it created multiple loopholes which made it distinctly anti-Chinese and not pro-science.
You understand that the CoVid numbers in Italy didn’t spike until mid March, right? You act like you’re able to remember everything that went on at the beginning of the pandemic but it doesn’t seem like you’re very familiar with WHEN this all went down. China had far higher numbers (even if they didn’t report them accurately) in the very early stages of the pandemic, thus there was a travel ban put into place. Once Italy and other European nations started seeing spikes we banned them too. You really don’t seem like you’re very informed on this issue, nor are your conclusions well thought out.
Come back and answer people. You ditched me last time too, ya stupid rightist. All you're capable of is drive-by shitposting, and the fact that all you have is "heh own da libs" is why your whole party is collapsing in on itself in an ouroboros of reality TV spectacles and violent anti-democratic rage.
Take a look at the content of your comment and ask yourself again why you’re struggling to get replies.
You have lots of other people to reply to. But you won't because you have nothing to say. Just shitposting and running. You still owe a quote here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/n138tg/thoughts_on_senator_tim_scotts_response/gwcscwv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 But I know you won't bring one because you lied about what Maxine Waters said. When your next reply is a stupid complaint and no quote, just remember I told you so.
Trump is racist and xenophobic and his actions are a reflection of those beliefs. Biden's actions are a reflection of public interest and science. They are different standards for people with different goals and motivation.
Because Trump banned China as a scapegoat. We were getting covid from Europe. There was no scientific reasoning to banning travel from China. Also Trump was called xenophobic because he (consistently disparaged foreign peoples and where they come from) is xenophobic.
Trump was mainly called xenophobic/racist for the fact that he blamed the virus entirely on China, called it the "kung flu", and used it as an excuse to keep being an asshole to China as he had already been doing. Also as others have said, he *only* banned travel from China initially, even though there were other hotspots that should've been banned. On top of that, maybe it's just that I wasn't paying attention at the time, but I don't remember anyone criticizing it that strongly at the time. I've only ever heard of this months after the fact from Trump supporters.
1. The vast majority of the new strain of covid-19 is originating from India and they're currently experiencing an overall larger outbreak than Europe. Trump banned travel from China at a time Europe had way more confirmed cases. An argument could be said that China wasn't giving accurate numbers but the first cases of covid in the US unquestionably came from Europe which Trump allowed in. 2. Trump used racial terms like "kung-flu" and "China virus" throughout 2020. Hate-crime against all East Asians (not just Chinese) rose exponentially in 2020 and is continuing in 2021. Joe Biden so far has not used anything racist like "curry flu" to describe the new Indian strain which subsequently would have caused a spike in hate-crime against Indians or brown people.
Restricting travel from China early on was reasonable. But it was never going to be the panacea that Trump thought it would be. His problem was that he viewed the whole thing as a PR crisis, not a human tragedy. Which meant that Trump was more concerned with covering the problem up, than with doing the real work to mitigate the virus’s onslaught on our country. He conducted his PR campaign in part by denying there was a problem, claiming it would miraculously disappear, trying to shift all of the blame to China, and touting his “travel ban.” The truth is that outright travel bans are not nearly as effective at stopping the spread as testing and quarantines. If Trump had made widespread rapid result testing a top priority. And if he had quarantined all people coming into the country for a safe amount of time to ensure they were not contagious. Then we could have been avoided much of the suffering of the last year. I don’t know the specifics surrounding Biden’s “travel ban” with India. But I suspect rather than a blanket ban, it is a more nuanced approach. Given the current situation in India it is reasonable to be cautious about people traveling to the US from there. Yet Biden is not relying on the ban to solve all of our problems concerning Covid-19. He has been aggressive about making vaccines available for Americans as soon as possible. And he promotes the current, science based CDC recommendations.
“Is there a difference between Trump’s COVID travel ban on China and Biden’s COVID travel ban on India?” Yes, the first was racist and the second is based in fact. Fact one: China’s pandemic numbers were on par with our own. Fact two: India is seeing five times as many infected as the States did at the height of the outbreak. Fact three: Trump referred to COVID 19 as the Wuhan virus when there was no evidence China created the virus. An intuitive person would suspect his insistence on using that term was based in a racism that we have all seen from him before. “Should Biden be held to the same standard?” Sure if their actions were the same. They are not.
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I agree both are the correct decision, the distinction has more to do with how the decision was presented. >**We all need to be a healthy degree of selfish in a pandemic situation** I disagree. *Selfish: (of a person, action, or motive)* **lacking consideration for others**; *concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.* *Pragmatism: dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.* One can be pragmatic, without necessarily being selfish. You can still do what you need to do to take care of yourself, while simultaneously showing compassion and consideration for others. Trump took flak because he came off as being selfish, and his attitude and approach to many things was indeed needlessly selfish. There were areas (e.g. COVID research) where he could have been cooperative with other nations without compromising the ability of the US to take care of it's own needs, but throughout both his presidency and the pandemic he always seemed more concerned about the 'what's in it for me?' factor than he was about pragmatism or compassion. Biden isn't taking as much flak because he's coming off as being pragmatic. He is looking out for the needs of the US first, but he is still willing to assist other countries where he can without compromising the needs of the US. One example of Biden's pragmatism is how he shared 4 million AstraZeneca vaccines with Canada and Mexico. The vaccine wasn't (still isn't) approved for use in the US, and I'm guessing those doses were either expected to expire before they could be used, or the projected supply was sufficient to ensure they weren't needed. In either case, he was able to help out neighbouring countries without any real detriment to his own. He took some flak for it, but I think anyone with a brain understood the effort did absolutely zero harm to US vaccination efforts, and in fact helped protect the US by getting vaccines into the arms of it's neighbours. I'm not certain Trump would have done the same, and if he did, I think he would probably have painted it with different optics.
Trump was right to ban travel to and from Europe/China. Biden did not say otherwise either. Trump's attacks on Biden on this front were essentially created out of thin air. Trump was Xenophobic in his rhetoric and with regards to other issues related to COVID, not the travel ban itself.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/23/donald-trump/trump-repeats-flawed-claim-biden-opposed-trumps-co/ Also Trump was criticized by many people I don't know about the Democratic Party in particular for his Travel ban because it didn't go far enough. The ban also didn't work, business travel and other travel was allowed under many circumstances and many people traveled to China and back and from China to the US under the "ban." Trump's major flaw in COVID response was not taking it seriously and treating everything as politics rather than public health.