Former President Donald Trump completely bungled his response to the coronavirus pandemic, unless holding super-spreader events while dancing to YMCA while Americans were dying is considered a successful tactic in battling the spreading disease.
As it happens, the twice-impeached one-term president had an even more boneheaded idea during the early days of the pandemic, according to ‘Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,’ a new book by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. Trump was concerned over the rising coronavirus cases being reported and how that would reflect his reelection chances.
“In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil,” the Washington Post reports.
‘“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”’ the outlet reports.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.”
“Aides were stunned, and when Trump brought it up a second time, they quickly scuttled the idea, worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects,” the report on the book adds.
“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”
That echoes Trump’s comments at a rally almost one year ago in which he said, “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down please.'”
Thankfully, Americans fired the former president, and Joe Biden is now at the helm. The ‘America First’ president would have literally sent infected Americans to Gitmo, where they hold suspected terrorists. This is even worse than Trump’s idea of injecting bleach to fight against COVID-19. How does this man have any support at all?
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
