Mark Meadows, who served as former US President Donald Trump's fourth and last White House Chief of Staff has made a stunning revelation in his memoir, which is that Trump tested COVID-positive merely three days before his first presidential debate against 77-year-old presidential candidate Joe Biden, The Guardian reported on Wednesday, 1 December.
There was intense speculation during the debates about Trump, who was 74 at the time, testing positive before the first debate but hiding that fact, thereby putting Biden's health and life at risk.
Meadows’ memoir titled The Chief’s Chief is due for publishing next week.
Just before Trump's presidential helicopter was about to take off to take him to Pennsylvania for a rally, Meadows writes that the White House doctor, Sean Conley, had called to inform that the president had tested positive.
The former physician to the President Trump had asked Meadows to "stop the president from leaving" because "he [had] just tested positive for Covid."
Trump's flight couldn't be stopped but when the chief of staff later had a call with him, the latter broke the news.
"Mr President, I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19."
Trump, according to Meadows, replied with "Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me", which is a slang for "oh you've got to be kidding me."
Meadows then goes on to write that an old model kit had been used to test Trump, and told the president that he should take another test with "the Binax system", "hoping [that] the first test was a false positive."
The test with the new model kit returned negative.
Trump then gave his staff "full permission to press on as if nothing had happened."
Meadows, however, "instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive."
"I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks," Meadows writes, "but I also didn’t want to alarm the public."
The public was never told about the first test.
(With inputs from The Guardian.)
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