Fmr. President Trump Reportedly Suggested Shipping Sick Americans Off To Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay – a detention center notorious for its employment of inhumane torture techniques on suspected terrorists, serving as the backdrop to 2008's highly-anticipated Harold & Kumar sequel, and an almost becoming a Covid-19 treatment center for sick Americans?

According to an upcoming book by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta on how former president Donald Trump and his administration navigated the Covid-19 outbreak, 45 allegedly suggested turning Guantanamo Bay – the Caribbean prison once described as a “Hell” by a 70-year-old detainee – into a makeshift health care center for Americans who contracted the virus abroad. 

“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the President allegedly asked amid a February 2020 Situation Room meeting, per the Washington Post's preview of Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History. “What about Guantánamo?”

While aides were reportedly “stunned” at the suggestion, reasonably alarmed about the implications of treating sick Americans at a detention camp famed for waterboarding detainees in such a “gruesome” manner that even CIA officials “wept,” according to the LA Times, former President Trump then allegedly attempted to clarify his sentiments, offering an analogy about … international trade? “We import goods,” the then-president told his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.” Despite supposedly receiving a negative reaction, Trump broached the concept of caring for Covid-19 patients at Guantanamo a second time, where his dreams of shipping sick Americans off to the prison were once again quashed. Ya win some, ya lose some. 

Yet as the book notes, this was far from the Trump administration's only facepalm-inducing blunder in navigating the beginning of the pandemic. In March of 2020, Trump allegedly yelled at former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar about testing for the virus, lamenting that the process was “killing him.” “I'm going to lose the election because of testing," He reportedly screamed. "What idiot had the federal government do testing?” The answer to the then president's dramatic inquiry, dear reader? None other than his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who publicly took charge of the testing effort just five days earlier, working alongside the private sector. 

So folks, remember, nothing says “get well soon” quite like a nice, involuntary trip to Gitmo! But hey, maybe 45 was simply confused –  to paraphrase the old internet adage, waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay sounds rad as hell if you don't know what either of those things are. 

For more internet nonsense, follow Carly on Instagram @HuntressThompson_ on TikTok as @HuntressThompson_, and on Twitter @TennesAnyone.