US President Donald Trump on Thursday denied lying to Americans about the severity of COVID-19 after a bombshell new book by journalist Bob Woodward said that he deliberately downplayed the crisis.
Trump’s taped admission to Woodward that he minimized the pandemic in public, while being aware from the start about the unique danger presented by COVID-19, has set off alarm bells less than eight weeks before election day.
Trump was asked at a White House press conference: “Why did you lie to the American people?” He responded: “I didn’t lie.”
Photo: AFP
He said that he had softened the dangers in public so as to preserve calm.
“I don’t want to jump up and down and start screaming ‘Death! Death!’” he said.
Trump has been thrown onto the defense after multiple excerpts and recordings from Woodward’s book Rage were released on Wednesday.
Following two Fox News interviews, dozens of tweets and the press conference, Trump continued his bid to put his election message back on track by holding a rally with supporters in Freeland, Michigan.
He told the excited crowd that his approach to COVID-19 matched that of the British government in World War II with its famous “Keep calm and carry on” morale-boosting posters.
Apparently meaning Woodward, he referred in his speech to “this whack job that wrote the book.”
Rage is filled with startling episodes, including the assessment by then-US director of national intelligence Dan Coats that Trump “doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
The segments in which Trump candidly discusses the COVID-19 pandemic — responsible for killing almost 200,000 Americans — are receiving the most attention.
Despite openly describing to Woodward the dangerous characteristics of the then-unknown virus, including that it is transmitted by air, Trump said: “I wanted to always play it down.”
Trump went on to explain to Woodward that he wanted to avoid causing panic.
However, his acknowledgement that he failed to tell the country the unvarnished truth prompted outrage.
Critics quickly resurrected his multiple statements from the early stages of the pandemic in which he told the public that it was no worse than a regular flu and breezily predicted it would “disappear” in a short period.
“He knew how deadly it was,” former US vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said on Wednesday.
“He lied to the American people. He knowingly and willingly lied about the threat it posed to the country for months,” he said.
Trump usually fights criticism by blaming what he calls “the fake news” and claiming that unnamed sources commonly used in White House reporting do not exist.
Shooting the messenger would not work in the case of Rage. The revelations rely mostly on Trump himself and Woodward — famous for bringing down former US president Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal — has published recordings.
In one dig at Woodward, Trump wrote on Twitter that if the legendary reporter thought that the quotes were “so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives?”
“Because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!” Trump added.
Why Trump would grant Woodward so much access in an election year is a question many in Washington are asking. The reporter had 18 interviews with the president and was entirely open about them being put on tape.
“I did it out of curiosity,” Trump said.
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