Bill Gates: Donald Trump doesn’t know the difference between HPV and HIV
May 18, 2018
Bill Gates has a terrifying Donald Trump story. Or should I say, a series of terrifying Trump stories. Bill Gates was one of those “captains of industry” who visited Trump Tower in the weeks following the election. Gates and Trump aren’t social friends or anything, and Gates seems to spend most of his time and energy working with his wife on their foundation, or hanging out with Roger Federer. So it was in that capacity that Gates met with Trump, in the capacity of “Gates has the largest foundation in the world, a foundation that works on health crises and poverty issues around the globe.” Well, in new footage obtained by MSNBC and Chris Hayes, Gates details what happened in that meeting.
Going to Trump Tower: “There was a thing where he and I were at the same place before the election and I avoided him. Then he got elected. So then I went to see him in December. He knew my daughter, Jennifer, because Trump has this horse show thing down in Florida. He went up and talked to Jen and was being super nice. And then around 20 minutes later he flew in on a helicopter to the same place. So clearly he had been driven away and he wanted to make a grand entrance on a helicopter. Anyway, so when I first talked to him it was actually kind of scary how much he knew about my daughter’s appearance. [Gates’ wife] Melinda did not like that too well.”
Gates told Trump about the foundation’s work on an HIV vaccine: “In both of those two meetings he asked me if vaccines weren’t a bad thing because he was considering a commission to look into ill-effects of vaccines. And somebody, Robert Kennedy Jr., was advising him that vaccines were causing bad things and I said, ‘No, that is a dead end, that would be a bad thing, do not do that.’”
HIV and HPV: “Both times he wanted to know the difference between HIV and HPV and so I was able to explain that those are things that are rarely confused with each other.”
Gates says Trump talks about himself in the third person, like Kellan Lutz: “When I walked in his first sentence kind of threw me off. He said, ‘Trump hears that you don’t like what Trump is doing.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, but you are Trump.’”
The biggest headline is obviously that Trump doesn’t know the difference between HPV – a common infection that most people don’t know they have until later years – and HIV, the virus which ravaged the gay community in the 1980s and has left millions dead. Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn died of HIV/AIDS, so that makes it especially weird, right? But what really terrifies me is not just that Trump doesn’t know the difference between HPV and HIV, it’s that he’s “heard” that vaccines are bad and that’s all that sticks with him. We live in Idiocracy, only a million times worse. Also: Trump is so gross about daughters.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
