…Washington Post journalists claim in new book

A new book is claiming former United States President Donald Trump suggested in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that Americans, who had contracted coronavirus in Asia and wanted to come home, should be sent to Guantanamo Bay instead.

The book, written by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, is based on interviews with more than 180 people with knowledge of Trump’s response to COVID-19, including senior White House staff and health leaders.

According to reports in US media today, the book states that as Trump’s team discussed bringing infected Americans home to receive care, he argued for the US military prison in Cuba to be used instead.

During the discussions in the Situation Room in February of last year, Trump reportedly asked: “Don’t we have an island that we own? What about Guantanamo?”

TRUMP DIDN’T WANT COVID ON US SOIL

Trump allegedly then made a comment about how America imports goods – not viruses – and said he didn’t want to increase COVID numbers on US soil.

Abutaleb and Paletta say in the book that Trump’s aides dismissed the idea after it was raised by the president again, arguing that American tourists being quarantined at the same place where the country holds terrorism suspects wouldn’t be good optics.

The book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, is described on Amazon as “the definitive account of the Trump administration’s tragic mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the chaos, incompetence, and craven politicisation that has led to more than a half million American deaths and counting”.

It comes out next week.