Trump Warned Bob Woodward About the Lethality of Covid in April: ‘This Thing Is a Killer’
CNN released another snippet of the on-the-record, taped conversations between President Donald Trump and journalist Bob Woodward, this time revealing that the nation’s leader was admitting on April 13 that the Covid-19 virus was “a killer.”
Speaking with CNN reporter Jamie Gangel, who has been previewing excerpts of Woodward’s new book, Rage, host Anderson Cooper divulged the latest damning comments by Trump in the early months of the outbreak.
“These audio tapes show an ongoing pattern by Trump of misleading and playing down Covid to the public as you said while privately telling Woodward how dangerous the virus was,” Gangel explained. “And it wasn’t just the February call or the March call. On April 5th, before we get to our audio, Trump tells Woodward it’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable. And then a week later on April 13th, he tells Woodward this…”
CNN then played the audio of Trump saying, “This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.”
“Yes, yes, exactly,” Woodward replies to Trump.
Notably, a New York Times analysis of Trump’s press conference on that same day showed a swaggering leader, who confidently predicts the death toll will be easily kept in check — even though the fatality total — which will surpass 200,000 in a few days — has more than doubled the estimates Trump dismissed at that point.
You looked at the charts, and the charts are — and the models from early on — predictions were 100 [thousand] and 120,000 people look like. If they did well, they were going to unfortunately perish. And we’re going to be, hopefully, way, way below that number.
Gangel then played another clip from mid-August, the last call between Trump and his interlocutor.
“This was on August 14th. More than 168,000 Americans have died from the virus on that day and Trump calls Woodward because he knows the book is done,” Gangel explained. “And he’s fishing. He’s trying to figure out. Trump talks about the stock market. The book is tough and that the focus is the virus.”
In the clip, Woodward said: “It’s going to be a contest between you and Biden. It’s going to be a contest between both of you and the virus. The virus is — because it’s in real people’s lives, you know, all those tens of millions of people who don’t have jobs, who don’t have —”
“I know,” Trump responded, and then moments later, plaintively insisted: “Nothing more could have been done. Nothing more could have been done. I acted early. I acted early.”
Gangel pointed out that Trump was clearly trying to spin Woodward one final time.
“We know that’s not true, Anderson,” she noted of Trump’s claim he did all he could. “So much more could have been done. Just what is stunning here is here we are a month later, today is September 14th. That was a month ago. He’s still doing the opposite of a responsible public health plan. We still don’t have adequate testing and tracing. He had those indoor rallies, those pictures you showed with thousands of people without masks or social distancing. And as Woodward describes in his book, we still have a failure of leadership.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
