Former President Donald Trump was so frightened that rising coronavirus cases would hurt his polling numbers that he suggested a group of infected Americans being brought home from Asia should be sent to Guantánamo Bay. “Don’t we have an island that we own?” Trump reportedly asked aides in February 2020, at the start of the pandemic. “What about Guantánamo?” The story features in Nightmare Scenario, a new book by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, capturing the chaos of the Trump White House as COVID-19 hit. The pair report that Trump was incensed that official testing was boosting case numbers and shouted at Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?” “Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, referring to the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. According to the Post, the book suggests that the president’s own infection was “far more serious than officials acknowledged.”
