• Meadows says Trump told him it was impractical for Meadows to get COVID-19 after the election.
• Meadows tested positive for the virus on November 5, 2020, two days after the general election.
• “The president told me now is not a good 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 impractical for him to contract COVID-19 shortly long after the 2020 presidential election.

In “The Chief’s Chief,” Meadows wrote that he learned he tested positive for the virus on November 5, two days after the general election. He said he recovered quickly, but remained in isolation for several days.

“After only a day at home, and an immediate dose of hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak, I felt normal,” he wrote. “The president told me now is not a good time for me to get sick. I still had to work from home.”

Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that Trump had touted as a possible cure for COVID-19, but studies have shown that it has no effect on the disease and may cause 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 called azithromycin and several studies found it had little to no impact on COVID-19 patients.

Meadows went on to write that he felt “physically good” but “mentally troubled” because of unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the election.

“During the days I spent sitting at home, I received calls from people across 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 which were shocking and remain shocking to this day.”

Meadows went on to say Democrats had “worked tirelessly” in the battlefield states to “flood the system with ballots, many of which were mailed” to steal the election from Trump. He alleged that battlefield state officials used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to “change electoral procedures” and “lower the standards for determining which ballots could be considered valid.”

Meadows’ baseless claims echo much of the rhetoric of the Trump camp in the aftermath of the election. He made general and unspecified allegations of electoral malfeasance and electoral fraud, the majority of which have been refuted and refuted by courts and election officials across the country.

In fact, the 2020 election saw record turnout, including by mail, and unprecedented numbers of citizens have come together to serve their communities as election workers. The election was also immune from foreign interference and technological vulnerabilities due to widespread use of paper ballots and voting machines with verifiable paper traces.

Overall, non-partisan election officials and cybersecurity experts concluded that, contrary to the former president’s claims, the 2020 election was the safest and most secure in U.S. history.