- Meadows says Trump told him it was inconvenient for Meadows to get COVID-19 following the election.
- Meadows tested positive for the virus on November 5, 2020, two days after the general election.
- "The president told me it was not a convenient time for me to get sick," Meadows wrote in his memoir.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote in his new memoir that then-President Donald Trump told him it was inconvenient for him to contract COVID-19 shortly after the 2020 presidential election.
In "The Chief's Chief," Meadows wrote that he learned he'd tested positive for the virus on November 5, two days after the general election. He said he recovered quickly, but remained isolated for several days.
"After just one day at home, and an immediate dose of hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak, I was feeling normal," he wrote. "The president told me it was not a convenient time for me to get sick. Still I had to work from home."
Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malaria drug Trump had promoted as a possible COVID-19 remedy but studies have shown it has no effect on the disease and comes with a risk of causing heart rhythm problems. For these reasons, the FDA revoked emergency use authorization in June 2020, months before Meadows took it. A Z-Pak is a five-day course of a common antibiotic known as azithromycin and multiple studies have found it has little to no impact on COVID-19 patients.
Meadows went on to write that he felt "physically fine" but mentally "disturbed" because of unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the election.
"During the days that I spent sitting in my home, I received calls from people all over the country who had troubling stories to tell" regarding the election results, he said. He added that the unspecified people who called him "had found videos and evidence that was shocking and remains shocking to this day."
Meadows went on to claim that Democrats had "worked tirelessly" in battleground states to "flood the system with ballots, many of which were mail-in" in order to steal the election from Trump. He alleged that battleground state officials used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to "alter election procedures" and "lower the standards for determining which ballots could be considered valid."
Meadows' baseless claims parrot much of the rhetoric from the Trump camp in the aftermath of the election. He made broad and unspecified claims of election malfeasance and voter fraud, the majority of which have been disproven and debunked by courts and election officials across the country.
In fact, the 2020 election saw record-high voter turnout, including by mail, and an unprecedented number of citizens stepping up to serve their communities as election workers. The election was also secure from foreign interference and technology vulnerabilities because of widespread use of paper ballots and voting machines with verifiable paper trails.
In all, nonpartisan election officials and cybersecurity experts concluded that, contrary to the former president's claims, the 2020 election was the safest and most secure in US history.