Bill Gates talks about avoiding Trump, bizarre questions about vaccines, and Trump-style stunts in exclusive video obtained by MSNBC.
Thursday night, MSNBC host Chris Hayes aired never-seen-before footage of Bill Gates talking about two meetings he had with Trump since the election, one at Trump tower in December 2016 during the presidential transition and another at the White House in March 2017.
Chris Hayes explained that the footage was taken at a recent Gates Foundation event where the Microsoft founder took questions from the crowd.
Gate began by talking about the fact that, shortly before the election, he and Trump were at the same place at the same time but he avoided meeting him.
“I never met Trump before he was elected,” Gates explained.
“There was a thing during the election where he and I were at the same place and I avoided him,” Gates added – to the laughter of the audience.
Continuing, he said that he met with Trump twice since the election and recounted being frightened by Trump’s knowledge of his daughter Jennifer’s appearance [now 22-years-old].
Then he got elected, so I went to see him in December [2016]. He knew my daughter Jennifer [now 22] because Trump has this horse show thing in Florida. In fact he went up and talked to Jen and was being super nice and then like 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. [laughter]
So when I first talked him it was actually scary how much he knew about my daughter’s appearance. [laughter] But, Melinda didn’t like that too well.
Gates went on to recount that first meeting, telling the audience that he encouraged him to “be a leader who drives innovation.”
So I saw him in Trump Tower and I said ‘science and innovation is a great thing and you should be a leader who drives innovation.” And that conversation was about a broad set of things – energy and health and education – you know, “pick things things that you want to do that are big – “the HIV vaccine, you could accelerate that. Be associated with innovation.”
Continuing, Gates told the audience that Trump asked about vaccines and the difference between HPV and HIV.
The second time I saw him was the March after that, so March 2017 at the White House. 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, he named is 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.”
Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HPV and HIV. So I was able to explain that those were rarely confused with each other. [laughter]
The clip concluded with Gates discussing Trump referring to himself by name:
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.” [laugher]
You can watch the clip, below:
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