Republican Donald Trump betrayed the United States by secretly sending rare Covid tests to Russia for President Vladimir Putin’s personal use.
As the coronavirus spread throughout the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries faced a critical shortage of tests that could detect the illness, Trump secretly sent rare tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin, who was reported to be terribly frightened of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart.
The dictator warned Trump not to reveal that he had sent the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
According to Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, Putin told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine.
In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact.
But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
These interactions between Trump and the authoritarian leader of a country at war with an American ally form the basis of Woodward’s conclusion that Trump is worse than Richard M. Nixon, whose presidency was undone by the Watergate scandal, exposed a half-century ago by the Washington Post duo Woodward and Bernstein.
“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward writes in the book, “War,” which is set to be released Oct. 15.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” issuing a string of personal attacks on the author but Trump failed to discredit the book.
Cheung argued that the book is fiction but his boss is the most dishonest person ever to occupy the White House, and he recently shared a bizarre lie about immigrants eating cats and dogs.
As his likelihood of defeat in the November election looms closer, Trump’s mental acuity seems to be slipping.
With publication on the eve of the presidential election, Woodward, who has chronicled the successes and failures of U.S. presidents for 50 years, concludes that Trump is unfit for office.
President Joe Biden has exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership” throughout his tenure, mistakes notwithstanding.
In the book, Biden acknowledged some of his blunders, such as his decision to appoint Merrick Garland as attorney general.
Biden told an associate, “Should never have picked Garland” after his attorney general named a special prosecutor in the case against his son Hunter and amid the Justice Department’s incompetent prosecution of Trump — whose most damning trials are not going to occur before the presidential election.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, was mentioned in the book, but Woodward describes her as a shrewd and loyal second to Biden but not as an influential voice in his administration’s foreign policy.