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At the start of 2020, COVID-19 was a loaded gun aimed directly at the United States. Then Donald Trump pulled the trigger. This book tells that story, of what he did and the terrible human tragedy that he caused. The COVID-19 pandemic is already being memory-holed. It’s as if they want you to forget, and just get on with “normal” life. But as journalist Jonathan Vankin argues in Close to Zero, if we let this trauma that killed more than 600,000 Americans just fade away, only one thing is certain. It will happen again. One book is keeping the memory alive. Close To Zero is not only intent on making sure the pandemic doesn’t just slip into the mists of history, but the book aims to change the way we talk about this momentous, and horrific calamity — not as some kind of unfortunate accident or unavoidable twist of fate, but as an unspeakable crime committed by one man. Close To Zero, for the first time, tells the full story of Donald Trump’s personal, biological warfare attack against the very country, the very people, he was sworn to protect — the COVID-19 pandemic. What did Trump know and when did he know it? And more importantly — why did he do it? Why did the purported leader of the free world have the worst pandemic response? Vankin takes a deep dive into those questions, and emerges with some shocking answers. From a mysterious golf course phone call from Vladimir Putin two days before the existence of a deadly new virus was revealed to the world, through his repeated declarations that the pandemic would “disappear” when he knew exactly what the extreme dangers of the novel coronavirus were, to his final attempt to use the COVID-19 crisis to stage a coup and install himself in power indefinitely, Close To Zero builds the case against Trump, ultimately indicting him for deliberately causing a disaster that took more than a half-million American lives.

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