Trump Secretly Gave Putin Covid Tests During Shortage, Book Says

Donald Trump‘s political persona is based around putting the United States first. The pitch, as with just about everything the former president claims he stands for, comes with a few caveats. Journalist Bob Woodward writes in his new book War, for instance, that Trump secretly sent Russian President Vladimir Putin Covid-19 tests while the U.S. was facing a shortage in 2020.

Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter who helped break open the Watergate scandal, writes that Putin even warned Trump not to tell anyone about the delivery, which was intended for Putin’s personal use, “because people will get mad at you, not me.”

That’s not all.

Woodward also writes that Trump has secretly communicated with Putin as many as seven times since leaving office in 2021, describing an instance earlier this year when Trump sent an aide out of his office at Mar-a-Lago so he could talk with the Russian autocrat. The calls are concerning for several reasons, not least of which is that Trump has repeatedly defended Putin’s incursion into Ukraine while pushing Republicans to fight against sending aid to Ukraine.

Trump’s campaign has denied Woodward’s reporting. “None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement, adding that Woodward is an “angry, little man,” a “sleazebag,” “lethargic,” “incompetent,” and “overall a boring person with no personality.”

Kamala Harris responded later on Tuesday during an interview with Howard Stern. “Trump admires strongmen and gets played them because he thinks that they’re his friends, and they are manipulating him by flattery and with favor,” she said, emphasizing that “in the height of the pandemic … people were dying by the hundreds, everybody was scrambling to get the Covid test kits, and this guy who was president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his personal use.”
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Trump has been criticized for his cozy relationship with Putin since he took office, and has long spoken glowingly about the Russian president.

When asked in 2018 whether he believed the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election or Putin’s denial that he had interfered, Trump suggested he believed Putin. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said.

Trump has since defended Putin’s war on Ukraine, an American ally. He called Putin a “genius” as he first attacked Ukraine in 2022, while repeatedly claiming the attack would have never happened if Trump were still president. “I actually had a very good relationship with Putin,” he said last year.
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Putin is a former KGB agent, and many, including former Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster, believe the Russian president is exploiting Trump. McMaster wrote in a recently released book that Putin “played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery.”

“[Putin] knew really what Trump’s predilections were,” McMaster told CBS News in August. “One of my roles was to alert him to that — to say, ‘Mr. President, you know, this guy is the best liar in the world.’”