Donald Trump, who sought to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term as president, is now trying to inflate the threat of a new disease in order to close the southern U.S. border. The New York Times reports that the president-elect’s advisers have spent months looking for something to justify declaring a public health emergency and shutting down the border.

Donald Trump is planning to seal off the US-Mexican border by invoking public health emergency powers, a report has claimed. The President-elect's advisers have spent months searching for diseases that would allow them to justify closing the border using Title 42,