Not a Joke: Trump Wanted to Send COVID-Infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay - Vanity Fair

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One of the reasons Donald Trump should never again be allowed within 1,000 feet of the White House, or perhaps even the District of Columbia, is that he’s a wannabe dictator who literally sicced a mob on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election, which he is still contesting. Another is that he’s mentally unstable and thinks that he may be president again by August. But setting all of that aside, there’s also the fact that he was one of the worst presidents in modern history, whose actions led to the needless deaths of countless Americans from a deadly virus. And he apparently wanted to send some of the people infected with that virus to a prison synonymous with human rights abuses. Yes, really!

Per The Washington Post:

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. “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?”

“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.

Guantánamo Bay, of course, is a military prison established by George W. Bush in 2002 following the 9/11 attacks; its operations are considered to have breached human rights thanks to all the torture and indefinite detention without trial. Barack Obama pledged to close the camp, but Congress passed legislation prohibiting Guantánamo’s detainees from being placed within the U.S. In January 2018, Trump signed an executive order to keep the prison open, saying in a speech: “Terrorists who do things like place bombs in civilian hospitals are evil. When possible, we annihilate them. When necessary, we must be able to detain and question them. But we must be clear: Terrorists are not merely criminals. They are unlawful enemy combatants. And when captured overseas, they should be treated like the terrorists they are.”

In other Trump-publishing news, he’ll likely continue to spread his lies about the election in more than a dozen forthcoming books, according to Axios:

Trump has given at least 22 interviews for 17 different books since leaving office, with authors lining up at Mar-a-Lago as he labors to shape a coming tsunami of Trump tomes, Axios has learned.... Offering Diet Cokes and dressed in suit and tie, Trump spent an average of about 90 minutes with each of the authors, some of whom were invited to stay and eat dinner at Mar-a-Lago (although not with him). The interviews are mostly on the record, for use when the books publish. So Trump, who has rarely been heard on non-Fox outlets since leaving office, will see himself quoted constantly over the next year.

Five authors have gotten two interviews: Michael Wolff...Maggie Haberman...former Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway...Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender, whose book is scheduled for August 10...and The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, whose Rigged is due September 21.

The Link Lonk


June 22, 2021 at 04:16AM
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Not a Joke: Trump Wanted to Send COVID-Infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay - Vanity Fair

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