A new book written by two journalists from The Washington Post says that in early 2020, then-President Donald Trump proposed sending Americans sick with COVID-19 who were returning from sightseeing to the Guantanamo naval base in Asia.

According to the authors, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, the former president would have suggested the idea up to two times in February 2020, when the World Health Organization had not yet declared the pandemic situation and known cases of coronavirus were concentrated in the continent. Asian.

“Don’t we own any island? Why not Guantanamo? We import goods, we are not going to import a virus,” Trump said during a meeting in the White House crisis room with his closest collaborators and officials. high ranking.

THE INVESTIGATION OF THE BOOK “NIGHTMARE SCENARIO”

The two Post journalists recreate this situation in their book from interviews with more than 180 people, some of them high-ranking US government officials and health officials.

According to the version of the book, the rest of the people present in the room reacted “dumbfounded” to the idea of ​​the then president and “let it go, worried about the rejection that would generate quarantining US tourists in the same base Caribbean in which the country imprisons terrorism suspects “.

The book, titled “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to a History-Changing Pandemic,” recounts, in addition to this episode, a “chaotic and often botched” decision-making process in the White House, loaded with “struggles for power”.

The Washington Post was one of the major newspapers in the United States that was most critical of Trump throughout his term and especially in relation to his management of the pandemic, and since the Republican did not occupy the White House, his audience in The internet has dropped considerably, according to the monthly figures published by the newspaper itself.

At the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, only 40 remain of the nearly 800 inmates that it housed after its opening in 2002 ordered by then-President George W. Bush in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

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