Trump Team Lashes Out After Damning Report on His Close Ties to Putin

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

The Russian autocrat may have had a point as, at the time, states around the country were having trouble getting supplies to fight the virus, and Trump was treating the virus as more of a public relations concern. Trump told governors in the pandemic’s early months that they would have to buy their own supplies rather than rely on the federal government, saying that the White House was not a “shipping clerk” for vital resources.

At the same time, though, the federal government was outbidding states. For example, Massachusetts’s governor at the time, Charlie Baker, told Trump his state was outbid three times by the federal government for critical supplies. Now Woodward’s reports show that not only was Trump unwilling to procure testing supplies to help state governments, he was secretly sending them to Putin for his personal use.