Trump never did this, right? It wouldn’t have been in keeping with his “reopen everything ASAP” approach to the pandemic. The closest he got that I can recall was in the earliest days of COVID last March, when most of the country was seeing relatively low caseloads but New York City was blowing up. At that moment the virus could still semi-plausibly be framed by Republicans as a “blue-state problem,” in which case why not seal off the blue states where the problem was raging? Trump’s former pandemic advisor, Tom Bossert, explicitly called for a cordon sanitaire of NYC at the time, in fact.
