John Bolton Backs Up Woodward on Trump’s Sluggish, Dismissive Response to Covid Threat: ‘President Simply Didn’t Want to Hear About It’

Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton agreed with Bob Woodward’s damning indictment of the president’s sluggish and dismissive response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Woodward shook the political landscape last week with the release of excerpts from his new inside-the-White-House account, Rage, in which Trump admitted that “I wanted to always play it down” when speaking publicly about the coronavirus threat in early February, which directly contradicted what his own national security and public safety officials were telling him. And, during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Woodward went further and concluded that the president had “failed” in his duty to the country because, as early as January: “He knew that this was a pandemic coming.”

“In mid August, the president told Bob Woodward, quote, ‘Nothing more could have been done to respond to the coronavirus pandemic,'” CNN host Wolf Blitzer noted at the start of the interview. “The death toll at that point was 168,000 in the U.S. You worked with the president, you know how he operates. Do you think he truly believes nothing more could have been done or is that simply damage control on his part?”

“Well, I think it is both,” Bolton said. “I think he believed it at the time, whether it is true or not. I think the history of the eight months that preceded that is very clear that the government reacted late, largely because in the early days of the virus the president simply didn’t want to hear about it.”

“He didn’t want anything to get in the way of the trade deal with China that he signed in January or anything that indicated a problem for the U.S. economy which he saw as his ticket to re-election,” Bolton added. “So precious months were lost when this pandemic could have been mitigated substantially. “

Watch the video above, via CNN.