Donald Trump‘s response to the coronavirus pandemic was lacking, to put it generously, and according to a new book, the former president was openly hoping the rampant virus would take out his political enemies. In a newly released excerpt from Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, Trump reportedly used to mock anyone in his orbit who caught COVID, and during one meeting, he made a remark about the virus killing former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was planning to release a damning book about his time in the administration.
While the Bolton remark sounds like just another one of Trump’s “jokes,” the authors sources believe he was being “dead serious,” according to Axios. Here’s more:
At one meeting several months [before Trump got sick], NEC director Larry Kudlow had stifled a cough. The room had frozen.. … Trump had waved his hands in front of his face, as if to jokingly ward off any flying virus particles, and then cracked a smile. “I was just kidding,” he’d said. “Larry will never get COVID. He will defeat it with his optimism.” … “John Bolton,” he had said … “Hopefully COVID takes out John.”
While wishing for a former employee’s death is (obviously) not great, it’s just another in a long line of moments that show Trump was not the best person to be leading the country during the pandemic. (Or at all.) A previous excerpt from Nightmare Scenario revealed that one of his plans to contain the spread of COVID was to send the infected to Gitmo. Although, that idea wasn’t so much about containment as it was about keeping America’s case count low, so it looked like everything was going great heading into the 2020 election.
(Via Axios)