Coronavirus: Bob Woodward book’s deflating revelation about Donald Trump
US President Donald Trump has explained why he decided to withhold information about the coronavirus from the American public.
COMMENT
At some point in the Trump presidency, we reached a moment where pretty much nothing he said shocked or surprised us anymore.
Comments that would have made global headlines a couple of years ago now routinely pass by without notice.
I don’t know when we crossed that line. Maybe that’s a topic for another article. But this week, a new revelation about the US President shook at least some of us out of our apathy.
We learned that in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when Mr Trump was repeatedly downplaying the threat in public, he privately acknowledged just how dangerous the disease was.
The source of this information is not some anonymous official, bitter ex-staffer or anti-Trump journalist. It is the President himself.
“I always wanted to play it down,” Mr Trump told Bob Woodward, who you probably know from his reporting on Watergate.
“I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
That conversation happened back in March, during one of 18 interviews Mr Trump gave Woodward for his book Rage. The book releases in a few days, so excerpts are starting to pop up in the media.
A month earlier, on February 7, Mr Trump privately explained how deadly and contagious the virus was.
“It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch,” he said.
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.
“It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.
“This is deadly stuff.”
The President cannot label these quotes fake news. They’re on tape. He said them, he meant them, and they completely change the story of how America’s flawed response to the virus unfolded.
Mr Trump did not, in fact, delude himself into believing the threat was overblown. He knew it was real all along, and deliberately withheld that information from the American people.
RELATED: Trump privately admits he ‘played down’ the virus
Here are some of the things Mr Trump said about the virus in public, long after he knew how deadly it was and how easily it could spread.
“I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away,” he said on February 25.
“You have 15 people. And the 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero,” he said on February 26.
“The risk to the American people remains very low,” he said, also on February 26.
“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” Mr Trump said on February 27.
“This is their new hoax,” he said on February 28, accusing the Democrats of politicising the virus and labelling fears about it “hysteria”.
“If you are a healthy, you will probably go through a process, and you’ll be fine,” he said on February 29.
“You have to be calm. It’ll go away,” he said on March 6.
“It will go away. Just stay calm,” he said on March 10.
“It’s gonna go away. It’s gonna go away,” he said on March 12.
“It’s something that we have tremendous control over,” he said on March 15.
“It will go away. You know it is going away,” he told a reporter on March 30.
“We think the deaths will be at a very low number,” he said, again on March 30.
“It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month, and if not, it hopefully will be soon after that,” he said on March 31.
“I said it’s going away, and it is going away,” he said on April 3.
“It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone,” he said on April 29.
“This is going to go away without a vaccine,” he said on May 8.
“It’ll go away. At some point, it’ll go away,” he said on May 15.
“Many of these people aren’t very sick, but they still go down as a case,” he said on May 19.
“You know, at some point this stuff goes away. And it’s going away. Our numbers are much lower now,” he said on June 15.
“It’s fading away. It’s going to fade away,” he said on June 17.
OK, you get the point.
The Trump administration did not start to recommend social distancing until mid-March. The President stressed that face masks were voluntary, refused to wear one himself in public until July, and mocked his election opponent, Joe Biden, for donning one.
When state governors finally imposed lockdowns, some of which were stricter than others, he quickly pushed for them to reopen their economies.
RELATED: Trump finally appears in public wearing face mask
These were not just empty words. All of them mattered.
Mr Trump is the President, and when he speaks, people listen. Some consider him to be their only truly reliable source of information.
So when he told Americans the virus would go away, and insisted the threat was being exaggerated by his political opponents, millions of people believed him.
Some of those people are dead now. The Democrats highlighted one of them, Mark Anthony Urquiza, at their convention last month.
“He had faith in Donald Trump. He voted for him, listened to him, believed him and his mouthpieces when they said the coronavirus was under control and going to disappear. That it was OK to end social distancing rules before it was safe. That if you had no underlying health conditions, you’d probably be fine,” Mr Urquiza’s daughter Kristin said.
“So in late May, after the stay-at-home order was lifted in Arizona, my dad went to a karaoke bar with his friends. A few weeks later he was put on a ventilator, and after five agonising days, he died alone in the ICU, with a nurse holding his hand.
“My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.
“Donald Trump may not have caused the coronavirus, but his dishonesty and his irresponsible actions made it so much worse.”
Obviously, the Biden campaign was motivated by political self-interest when it told Mr Urquiza’s story, but that doesn’t make his death or his daughter’s fury any less tragic.
And now we know the truth. That when Mr Trump downplayed the virus, leading Americans like Mr Urquiza to take risks they shouldn’t have, he knew full well how dangerous it was.
Why did he do it? His excuse is that he didn’t want to create panic.
“I’m a cheerleader for this country,” Mr Trump told reporters this week.
“I love our country. And I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic.
“Certainly, I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We want to show confidence, we want to show strength. We want to show strength as a nation.
“That’s what I’ve done. We’ve done very well.”
“I don’t want to jump up and down and start screaming death, death,” he added a day later.
RELATED: Daughter says her dead dad felt ‘betrayed’ by Trump
That explanation is incredibly disappointing. The kindest interpretation I can come up with is that Mr Trump fundamentally misunderstands the role of a leader in a crisis situation.
The choice here was not between creating panic on the one hand, and giving people a false sense of security on the other. There was an obvious middle ground.
Mr Trump could have followed the example of pretty much every other global leader. He could have told Americans the threat was serious, but entirely possible to overcome, if they confronted it head-on.
In other words, he could have been honest with them. Instead, he pretended it would go away.
There is plenty of blame to go around, on both sides of US politics, for the country’s bungled coronavirus response.
Some of the Democrats now up on their high horses lecturing Mr Trump – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio both spring to mind – were themselves far too slow to act.
One can only hope voters will hold them accountable when the opportunity arrives.
RELATED: How New York’s Democratic leaders bungled virus response
Do their failures excuse Mr Trump’s though? No. For god’s sake, no. He is the President.
For too long, Mr Trump’s defenders in the administration, the conservative media and the general public have avoided confronting the man’s faults and missteps by instead focusing on his critics’ reaction to them, as though that matters more.
In this twisted alternate universe, the problem is not that the most powerful politician on the planet habitually lies to the people he is supposed to serve, but that the media calls him out for it.
It is not that Mr Trump abused the power of his office in a ham-fisted attempt to bully a foreign nation into launching a sham investigation of his political opponent, but that people inside the administration dared to blow the whistle on him.
It’s not that so many close associates of the President stand accused, or have already been convicted of committing crimes, but that law enforcement did its job and prosecuted them.
And it’s not the fact that 197,000 Americans are dead on Donald Trump’s watch, killed by a virus he told people not to worry about. Apparently that’s fine. No, the real outrage here is that journalists won’t shut up about it.
Woodward’s revelation this week was deflating.
It was confirmation that the situation in the US didn’t need to be this bad. That Mr Trump understood the scale of this crisis early on, and if he had made different choices all the way back in February, he could have changed his country’s fate.
But he didn’t. Even now, the man whose most fundamental job is to keep Americans safe continues to treat the virus with so much less seriousness than it deserves.
“We have rounded the final turn,” he said at a White House briefing on Thursday.
“We’re going to have vaccines very soon, maybe much sooner than you think.
“But we have done a phenomenal job.”
Mr Trump has resumed his political rallies, drawing crowds numbering in the thousands, with few masks and no social distancing whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the US is still recording about 40,000 infections every single day – more cases than Australia has suffered throughout the entire pandemic. It is still averaging more than a thousand deaths every 24 hours.
Mr Trump cannot fix the damage that has already been done, but he could at least try to stop any further death. I cannot fathom why he doesn’t.
Have your say. Tell me why I’m wrong on Twitter: @SamClench
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