Bill Gates has divulged some remarkable insights into the mind of Donald Trump, claiming the President didn’t know the difference between HIV and HPV but knew a “scary” amount about his daughter’s appearance.
Recorded at a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation meeting, the billionaire Microsoft founder - not renowned for his comedic wit - had the audience in stitches as he regaled them with a series of anecdotes.
Speaking about a meeting with Trump, he said: “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’re Trump.’ I didn’t know the third-party form was always expected. ‘Gates says that Gates knows that you’re not doing things right.’”
During the recording, obtained by MSNBC, Gates spoke about when his daughter, Jennifer, first met Trump at a horse show in Florida, he said: “And then about 20 minutes later he flew in on a helicopter to the same place. So clearly he had been driven away but he wanted to make a grand entrance in a helicopter.
“So when I first talked to him it was actually kind of scary how much he knew about my daughter’s appearance. Melinda [Gates’s wife] didn’t like that too well.”
Even more worryingly, Gates recalled Trump asking him about the extensively debunked conspiracy theory that vaccines can cause diseases such as autism.
He said: “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 – I think it was Robert Kennedy Jr – was advising him that vaccines were causing bad things. And I said no, that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that.”
To top it off Gates also had to explain the difference between the virus that leads to AIDS and the virus that leads to genital warts, saying: “Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other.”