Report: Trump Secretly Sent Covid Tests to Putin During 2020 Shortage

Vladimir Putin is notoriously terrified of Covid, so much so that he isolated to truly extreme degrees during the pandemic. There are countless photos of him sitting across an entire room from people during meetings, and Mikhail Zygar, former Editor-in-Chief of Dozhd, wrote that Putin “has completely lost interest in the present” as he has become more isolated than ever.

According to reporting from Bob Woodward, one half of the famed duo who helped uncover Watergate, President Donald Trump prioritized Vladimir Putin’s hypochondria over Americans facing a shortage of tests. Woodward reports that Trump “secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use” and that Putin “cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow.”

According to the book, Putin told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”

The way that Trump abandoned us during the pandemic has been forgotten by huge swaths of the electorate, but perhaps this will jog some memories about how Trump failed to get the personal protective equipment and other supplies for America, leaving states to fend for themselves. I will personally never forget how as a Coloradan, Gavin Newsom became my de facto president when California took over for the federal government out west.

And now we have a report that not only was Trump abdicating his responsibility to do basic government management of supplies, but he was actively depleting Covid tests during a shortage to give it to his bestie in Moscow for his personal use. I get how lefties recoiled at the John Grisham novel the #Resistance created around Trump’s Russian interests during his presidency, but it’s hard to look at Trump’s actions and not conclude he is beholden to Putin in some way, shape or form.

Maybe it’s not kompromat or any of the other spy terms that #Resistance liberals learned in the last decade. Maybe Trump just yearns for Putin’s affirmation so much that he is willing to betray his own people just so Putin will make googly eyes at him from inside his protective bubble. Vladimir Putin is a paranoid, unhinged leader who by all accounts is completely uninterested in other people or even just his present moment in time. He is the ideal best friend for Trump, and it is becoming harder and harder to assert that their relationship is not what it looks like.