'I wanted to always play it down’: Trump admits concealing true dangers of COVID-19 in latest Woodward book
He knew all along.
At the outset of the pandemic, President Trump privately voiced grave concerns about the deadliness of the coronavirus, even as he told the American people not to bother with social distancing and face masks because, he claimed, the crisis was under control, according to a new book by Bob Woodward.
The book, “Rage,” a copy of which was obtained by the Daily News before its release next Tuesday, is based on 18 on-the-record interviews with Trump and quotes the president as confessing to being well aware of the severity of the virus threat before it hit the U.S. in early 2020.
Recordings of several of Woodward’s interviews with Trump were released on Wednesday by CNN and The Washington Post, where the legendary journalist still works.
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward in a recorded interview Feb. 7, adding that he had learned from his public health advisers that COVID-19 was about five times “more deadly” than the seasonal flu.
At the time of the February interview, the first U.S. coronavirus death was still weeks away, and Trump kept telling reporters that Americans had nothing to worry about because COVID-19 wasn’t worse than a bad flu season.
“We have it very much under control in this country,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 23.
Five days later, he said, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear."
In another interview with Woodward, on March 19, Trump admitted that his upbeat assessments were not true.
"Really, to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward, according to another recording released Wednesday. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Trump told Woodward in the same interview that he understood young people could also suffer severe symptoms from COVID-19.
“Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people,” Trump said, contrasting his claim just last month that younger individuals are “almost immune" to the virus.
It would take until June for Trump to publicly endorse a national mandate on face masks, social distancing and pandemic restrictions on businesses.
In the interim, tens of thousands of Americans died.
If Trump had called on states to shut down their economies and enforce social-distancing restrictions sooner, thousands of deaths could’ve been averted, according to public health experts.
“Even a simple thing like voicing encouragement of face mask usage early on — that could’ve saved thousands of lives,” said Dr. Dean Winslow, an infectious disease expert at Stanford University who was once under consideration by Trump to become a senior-ranking public health official at the Defense Department.
“There were a lot of really, really missed opportunities," Winslow continued, “and in my mind, the biggest one was not mustering the full force of the federal government. We’re still suffering from that.”
More than 190,000 Americans have died from the virus so far — the worst national death toll in the world by far. The U.S. also leads the world in the number of confirmed infections, and several states are experiencing resurgences.
Despite Woodward’s recordings, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed Trump never lied to the American people.
“The president never downplayed the virus. He expressed calm,” McEnany told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
But, later in the day, Trump contradicted McEnany when he was asked why he purposely misleads the public.
“Well, I think if you said in order to reduce panic, perhaps that’s so,” Trump said. “I don’t want to create panic as you say, certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We want to show confidence, we want to show strength."
Woodward — whose work with fellow Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein helped uncover President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal — writes in the book that Trump’s own top advisers repeatedly warned him in early 2020 that COVID-19 could inflict a catastrophic toll on the U.S.
"This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, told him on Jan. 28, according to Woodward.
But Trump apparently didn’t heed O’Brien’s warnings and spent the following months publicly downplaying the virus.
“You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” Trump said on Feb. 26 of the number of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. at the time.
Woodward writes that Trump’s failure to act in February proved one of the most devastating mistakes of his presidency.
In the past few weeks, Trump has renewed his push for states to rapidly reopen their economies.
He has also held packed campaign rallies in violation of his own administration’s COVID-19 guidelines while mocking people for wearing masks, including telling a reporter at the White House this week that he didn’t want to answer his question because he sounded “muffled.”
Trump’s incessant flip-flopping on the virus comes even as health experts fear that the fall could bring another massive outbreak.
In his final interview with Woodward in July, Trump suggested he’s not taking a more aggressive stance on the virus because he doesn’t consider himself to be at fault.
“The virus has nothing to do with me,” Trump said in the July 21 interview. “It’s not my fault. China let the damn virus out.”
