CNN’s Stelter Asks If Woodward Was ‘Trying to Help Trump’ Through Covid Crisis by Using Interviews To Be a ‘Leadership Coach’

On Sunday, CNN’s Brian Stelter held court over Donald Trump’s coronavirus downplaying and why Bob Woodward took the approach he did for composing his new book on the president’s administration.

In a panel conversation for Reliable Sources, former ABC News anchor Sam Donaldson told Stelter that Woodward’s Trump tapes are “not really a smoking gun because we knew [Trump] was a liar” primarily focused on re-election. Former CDC detective Dr. Seema Yasmin took a negative view of Woodward’s tapes, siding with those who’ve argued that the Washington Post associate editor should’ve warned the public of Trump’s Covid-19 downplaying a long time ago.

Bob Woodward himself is saying the president of the U.S. has a duty to warn. That’s correct, but so do you, Bob, and so do I, and so does every journalist who signed up for this job. If you have information that can save even one life, let alone close to 200,000 lives, then you have a journalistic duty, an ethical duty to share that information. We should not be learning that now, seven and a half months after you first sat down with the president, when we’ve lost so many people.

After Yasmin concluded that “of course” Woodward’s tapes could’ve made a difference if released months earlier, Bill Carter agreed it would be hard to argue against that “from a moral point of view,” even if it’s an open question how much it would’ve changed anything.

Stelter moved the conversation onward by offering his hypothesis that Woodward “seems to be trying to help Trump manage this crisis.” He pointed to excerpts of Rage where Woodward tried to use a phone conversation with the president to bring up multiple pressing issues, and stressing the need for Trump to mobilize the government.

In this conversation…Woodward is trying to help Trump get us through this crisis. I think perhaps from Woodward’s point of view, he was trying to do his part, not just as a journalist, but as a citizen, in those terrible weeks in March and April. I think that’s an interesting part of this, that Woodward is on the phone with Trump so often, almost trying to coach Trump like a leadership coach, and I wonder in the coming days if Woodward will say that was part of his rationale for what he was doing.

The panel continued to debate the timing and the impact over the release of Woodward’s tapes, though Yasmin pushed back on Stelter’s efforts to rationalize Woodward’s approach to the situation.

It’s not Bob Woodward’s job to be a leadership coach to the president of the United States. It’s his job to be a journalist. I really hope his journalistic duties align more with the public than with a book launch. But also, his poor judgment on this has now become a defense for the president, who’s saying ‘well, if I what I said was so important or so bad or had legitimate public health impacts, then of course Woodward would have shared this with editors at the Post earlier and would’ve published it…

Watch above, via CNN.