Trump and the Logic of Racializing of Covid-19 (Blame it on the Immigrants)

There are four truths regarding the United States.  One is that it is a nation of immigrants. Two, it is perhaps the hardest hit country in the world with the coronarius.   Three, it is the richest  nation in the world.  Four, there is a US presidential election this year. Put these  four truths together and what do you get in an America under President Donald Trump?  An effort to blame the spread of Covid-19 on immigrants and immigration, thereby racializing the pandemic to hide his mismanagement of the crisis.
The United States is a nation of others.  No one, except for the original Indians, is native here.  Everybody came from somewhere else.  America sees itself as a melting pot of races, ethnic groups, religions, and nations.  Its history is one of welcoming, as it says on the Statute of Liberty in New York–”your tired, your poor,  your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”  The US is a nation of others, of strangers who have come for the American Dream.
Reports document that the US already has had more than 800,000 infected with the coronarius, with nearly 50,000 dead.  In a nation so wealthy and powerful, many wonder how it could happen, placing  blame on President Donald Trump’s initial refusal to acknowledge the disease, and then his failure of leadership in confronting it.  As a result, Trump’s approval ratings have gone down, potentially threatening his chances at re-election this November.
Don’t count Trump out yet.    Instead of taking responsibility for the US pandemic, he is replaying his trick from four years ago, blame it on the other.  Four years he successfully ran for president by promising to build a wall along America’s Mexican border to halt immigration.  He called immigrants rapists, murderers, and drug dealers.  He attacked Muslims and sought to halt their immigration.  Trump ran on racism.  Now he is doing it again.
First Trump called the coronarius the “China Virus.”  He blames leaders in China for lying about the virus, says the World Health Organization for incompetence, and now he wants to halt immigration to the US for 60 days.  Obviously the coronarius is not our fault; it is the fault of others.  Trump is linking the coronarius to race and immigration much in the same way that four years ago he connected crime and the economy to race and immigration.
Yes in the past America screened immigrants who had health problems or infectious diseases and it might be legitimate to do that now.  But that is not what Trump is doing with the 60-day immigration ban.  In fact, the ban has a lot of exceptions to it and it is also not clear the president has the authority to issue the ban anyhow.  Instead, simply announcing the ban, like calling for the wall, is enough.  For his supporters, shifting the cause of the pandemic and the shutdown of the economy to immigrants is no different from what he said and did four years ago and it got him elected.  It might work again in 2020.