Trump declares the United States will 'soon be open for business'

Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump on Monday evening said while the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is "going to be bad," his administration is "trying to make it much less bad" and the United States "cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself."

Businesses deemed non-essential are closed across the country, leading to increased unemployment numbers, and that can't continue, Trump said. "Our country was not built to be shut down," he declared. "This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.