Donald Trump considered quarantining Americans infected with COVID on Guantanamo Bay when the pandemic first started to take hold, a new book claims. Trump is pictured in February, 2020
Donald Trump considered quarantining Americans infected with COVID on Guantanamo Bay when the pandemic first started to take hold in February 2020, a new book claims.
'Don't we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?' the president asked in the Situation Room in February 2020, according to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta in Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History.
Trump then brought up the idea a second time, forcing aides to quash the plan fearing a backlash over putting members of the public on the same island as terrorism suspects, according to an excerpt published in the Washington Post.
The book details the workings inside the White House before infections started to spread across the country at the end of February and start of March 2020 and is based off interviews with 180 people.
It also details how Trump allegedly fumed at US infections doubling from 14 to 28 when infected Americans were let off the Diamond Princess cruise ship onto U.S. soil and his anger over the CDC taking over testing.
Abutaleb and Paletta write that Trump also raged about testing, slammed letting the CDC take over and dealt with aides worried about undermining public health.
'Testing is killing me!' Trump reportedly shouted in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18.
'I'm going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?' the president added.
'Don't we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?' the president asked in the Situation Room in February 2020, according to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta in Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History
Trump frequently stated during the pandemic that the number of infections in the US were so high because the rate of testing was higher than anywhere else in the world.
'Uh, do you mean Jared?, Azar responded according to Abutaleb and Paletta.
The phone call came five days after Trump's son-in-law Kushner vowed to take over national testing with the help of the private sector.
'This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,' Trump told Azar in the heated phone call.
Kushner, according to the book, also called Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparedness chief, a 'f***ing moron' when he found out an order of 600 million masks would not arrive in the US until June.
'We’ll all
