Bob Woodward, of All the President’s Men fame, has been working for the Washington Post since 1971. But it took until Donald Trump‘s presidency for him to be “as stunned as I’ve ever been as a reporter.”
On Monday’s episode of CNN Tonight, Woodward “shared audio of Trump telling him — during recorded interviews for his 2020 book Rage now released separately as The Trump Tapes — what he told his youngest son Barron Trump during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic,” according to the Huffington Post. In the recording from March 19, 2020, the former-president said, “I said, it came out of China, Barron. Pure and simple. It came out of China. And it should’ve been stopped. And to be honest with you, Barron, they should’ve let it be known it was a problem two months earlier… The world wouldn’t have a problem. We could have stopped it easily.”
As host Jake Tapper pointed out, Trump knew in January 2020 that the coronavirus was “deadly stuff,” but he chose to do nothing about it because “I wanted to always play it down… I don’t want to create a panic.”
Over one million people have died from COVID-19 in the United States alone.
After listening to the recording from the March 2020 interview for a second time, Woodward thought, “My God, Trump is conning not just me but his son and he is laying out, ‘Oh this could have been fixed, the Chinese could have done something about it.’ Donald Trump could have done something about it by being honest and warning the public that he as president has constitutional and moral responsibility to do.”
You can watch the CNN interview above.
(Via the Huffington Post)