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

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

published 23 March 2020

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."

The United States will "soon be open for business, very soon, a lot sooner than the three or four months that somebody was suggesting," Trump continued. He called COVID-19 the "invisible enemy," and later warned that if the economy doesn't rebound, more people will die. "People get tremendous anxiety and depression and you have suicide over things like this, when you have a terrible economy you have death, definitely would be in far greater numbers than we're talking about with regard to the virus. We have a double obligation."

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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.

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