> China bans WhatsApp. The U.S. bans WeChat. Great, no I have no official app besides good old text and phone to communicate with my fiancée who is still banned from reentering the U.S. despite still having a job here.

FYIW you can use HelloTalk to talk / call each other, as they need to censor their users so that the ones interested in learning Chinese can talk to the much larger mainlander population that's learning English.

Also I'm pretty sure that LinkedIn operates in China. The messaging system is decent with even support for group chats. I'm just not sure if DMs are allowed if one party is a foreigner and one isn't.

I thought the border restriction was just about having been in China in the last 14 days. Couldn't she get back into the US if she went to a different country first for 14 days?

No. The U.S. refuses to even process visas. Early on, the U.S. initially held her passport (a foreign one at that!) for over a month, preventing travel to countries she had valid visas to. When she eventually did once the passport was returned, the U.S. canceled her appointment, forcing travel back to China. Such foreign visas have now expired. The U.S. continues to allow appointments to be made at embassies and consulates and then cancels them right before. She actually falls into one of the conditional allowances that should get her back, based upon lawsuits from large employers, but the U.S. is not keeping appointments and not processing visas. So whatever they claim is allowed (which is not much), they are blocking that and more on a procedural level, just like they were doing since January before any bans were even in place. They don’t care.

H1Bs and others (at least from China) are banned at a minimum until January 2021.

That’s rough.

We are in a similar situation. She’s got a tourist visa though, and while we think it would technically be possible for her to enter the US, we’re kind of afraid to try.

> because the so-called president wants to personally gain from these actions

I sympathize with your wife's predicament (I know people stuck in similar situations) but he is not the 'so-called' president. He is a duly elected leader of the American people. Perhaps this type of obnoxious attitude by us liberals towards half the country is what caused this mess to happen in the first place.