Trump addressed the nation from the oval office on television last night where he announced that travel from Europe to the United States would be temporarily banned because, in his words, those dirty Europeans are responsible for infecting us.
According to numerous reports, the Trump regime did not consult our allies in Europe before the announcing the ban and now they're understandably offended by it.
And there's an apparent political angle to Trump's new travel ban which has gaping holes in. The ban will only apply to European countries within the European Union's passport free zone; meaning it doesn't include the United Kingdom which recently made their "Brexit" official.
From the Associated Press:
Trump, who had called COVID-19 a “foreign virus” and claimed that European travelers “seeded” infection clusters in the United States, said late Wednesday that all European travel would be cut off.
“The European Union disapproves of the fact that the U.S. decision to impose a travel ban was taken unilaterally and without consultation,” European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a joint statement. [...]
The measures announced by Trump don’t apply to the United Kingdom, where the number of confirmed cases has reached almost 460, with eight deaths, or Ireland, which isn’t part of Schengen, and has 43 cases.
First of all, the first cases of the virus that popped up in the United States were "seeded" by people who traveled to Wuhan, China.
I don't think this is a great reach, but I infer from Trump's language and his selective travel ban that the policy is meant to imply that uncontrolled immigration in central Europe is responsible for spreading the virus. The policy was targeted to exclude post-Brexit Britain and does not include far eastern European countries that are overwhelmingly white and anti-immigrant.
Trump's travel ban also apparently includes a temporary ban on trade with the same group of nations, so we're way beyond tariffs here. American businesses that found it difficult to continue operations with tariffs of 25 percent on certain Europe goods will surely find it even more difficult when they literally can't stock goods while trade is suspended.