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Former President Donald Trump is said to have pitched the idea of sending COVID-positive Americans to Guantnamo Bay during the first months of the pandemic, believing the detention center could serve as a near quarantine to stop the spread of the virus.
“Don’t we have an island that we own?” Trump asked in a meeting with officials in the Situation Room in February last year.
“What about Guantnamo?” He asked.
“We import goods,” he continued, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus!”
Trump’s aides, seemingly stunned by the suggestion, quickly “scuttled” the idea for fear the move would spark a strong reaction. The United States operates both the Guantnamo Bay naval base and the controversial detention center known as “Gitmo” which was first opened in 2002, just after the September 11 attacks. Since then, around 780 suspected terrorists have been held at the center in extremely austere living conditions. The camp has come under intense public scrutiny over the years, not least for subjecting its detainees to “improved interrogation techniques,” a euphemism for systematic torture. In 2018, Trump signed an executive order guaranteeing the prison would remain open, brandishing the claim that “torture works”, despite long-standing evidence to the contrary.
The exchange, first interrupted by The Washington Post, is expected to feature in the forthcoming book, “Nightmare Scenario: In The Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” Post reporters. Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta.Abutaleb and Paletta, who interviewed 180 people for their book, including several senior White House officials and government health officials, details a number of chaotic episodes in which the administration Trump has failed to address the scale of the pandemic.
In one case, Trump spoke openly about the coronavirus outbreak in terms of prospects for re-election.
“The tests are killing me!” Trump reportedly shouted during a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in March. “I’m going to lose the election because of the tests! What idiot the federal government had the tests done?” he asked, seemingly oblivious or unaware that he had handed over responsibility for the federal response to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The book also noted that Trump has repeatedly overruled the advice of top health officials in his administration, such as Robert Kadlec, then HHS chief emergency preparedness, and director of the US National Institute of allergies and infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci. For example, after Kadlec ordered 600 million masks from the United States, telling Kushner that they wouldn’t arrive until June, Trump’s son-in-law allegedly threw his pen against the wall and said, “You bastard Fool. We’ll all be dead by June. “
Axios reported an excerpt from the book which details how Trump wished death via COVID on his former national security adviser John Bolton:
During a meeting several months [before Trump got sick], the director of the NEC, Larry Kudlow, had stifled a cough. The room had frozen. Trump waved his hands in front of his face, as if jokingly pushing away any flying virus particles, then smiled. “I was joking,” he had said. “Larry will never have COVID. He will defeat it with his optimism.” “John Bolton,” he said, “Hopefully COVID eliminates John. “
In another case, Marc Short, the chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, complained that the president was in fact overreacting to advice from his health officials. Short, who was tasked with examining the political and economic implications of the administration’s response, reportedly pushed back an HHS effort to distribute free masks to every U.S. household as the pandemic escalated, citing fears that they look like “underwear on your face.”
Despite the administration’s apparently dictatorial approach to the pandemic, the book finally notes that “no one was in charge of the response”.
“Was it Birx, the coordinator of the task force? Was it Pence, the task force leader? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, who was leading the shadow task force until it was no longer? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync? “Ask the authors.” In the end, there was no accountability and the response was rudderless.
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