Donald Trump told his staff he wanted to send all Americans who were exposed to coronavirus while overseas or on cruise ships to Guantanamo Bay on Cuba as a way to lower the numbers of US cases, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As reported from Business Insider, Trump asked aides, “Don’t we have an island that we own?” in February 2020 as cases were spreading in Asia and Europe.  “What about Guantanamo?”

“We import goods….We are not going to import a virus,” Trump told aides after US had reported its first couple hundred cases according to “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” written by Washington Post writers Yasmeen Abultaeb and Damian Paletta and due for release on June 29.

Trump repeatedly said he didn’t want cruise ships crowded with passengers to dock in US ports because, he believed, the increased number of cases would make him look back, even though those passengers needed medical care.  “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” Trump said in a Fox News interview.

Trump also wanted to cut down on coronavirus testing because the increasing number of cases make him look bad, according to the book.  “Testing is killing me!” Trump exclaimed to former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, according the book. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”

Azar told Trump that it was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who pushed for more testing.

In another conversation with DHS officials in March, Kushner portrayed US coronavirus numbers as devastating even though he was publicly saying that the US would be open by July.

Kushner exploded at HHS official Robert Kadlec, calling him a “fucking moron” and lamenting that “we’ll all be dead by June.”