Tag: Woodward tapes
Bob Woodward Reveals New Tape of Trump’s Shocking COVID Comments
“It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it,” the president can be heard telling Bob Woodward on the new recording.
The hits keep coming from Rage author Bob Woodward, who premiered a new exclusive audio recording of President Donald Trump admitting behind closed doors how dangerous he knew the coronavirus to be long before he started taking it remotely seriously in public.
“Bob, it’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it,” Trump can be heard saying on the tape, which Woodward recorded on April 13th, 2020, and shared with Stephen Colbert for Monday night’s episode of The Late Show. The president goes on to tell what he apparently thought was a hilarious story about being in the Oval Office with a group of advisers when one of them let out a sneeze.
“A guy sneezed, innocently,” Trump says. “Not a horrible—just a sneeze. The entire room bailed out, OK? Including me, by the way.” Continue reading.
The deep malevolence that drives Trump’s behavior has now been laid bare
It figures that Bob Woodward, the man who helped to take down Richard Nixon 45 years ago, would follow up with a big book about Nixon’s natural heir to the presidency, Donald Trump. Just as Nixon was undone by tape recordings he foolishly made to document his own corruption, so too Trump foolishly allowed himself to be recorded by Woodward. That’s what sets Woodward’s book “Rage” apart from all the other Trump books that have come before: We can hear the quotes in Trump’s own voice, so he can’t get away with calling it fake news.
I think most of us who have been observing this surreal presidency for the past four years have wondered whether Trump is more ignorant than malevolent or vice versa. (Obviously, he’s both: It’s just a question of which is dominant.) It’s been especially hard to know during this pandemic catastrophe because the president has made so many ill-informed comments and odious decisions, from the inane hydroxychloroquine campaign to his decision not to implement a national testing program because most of the people dying in the early days were in blue states.
Listening to Trump blithely tell Woodward at the beginning of February that he knew the pandemic was going to kill a whole lot more people than the flu and that it was an airborne disease proves that he is malevolent first and foremost. You can hear it in his voice — so blandly detached and dispassionate as he talks about what he describes as “deadly stuff.” We know he’d been warned about the likelihood of the virus coming to America by this point. Woodward even reports that national security adviser Robert O’Brien had told Trump in January that the virus would be the “biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” Continue reading.
Trump draws fire for saying he downplayed virus to avoid ‘panic’
President Trump has an explanation for the new revelations that he purposely downplayed the risks of coronavirus: He says he didn’t want to cause panic.
Experts say Trump had another option: He could have calmly, but accurately, explained to Americans the risks associated with the outbreak and what they could do to lessen the danger.
Excerpts released this week from famed journalist Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, “Rage,” have raised questions about whether more lives could have been saved if Trump had, early in the pandemic, shared with Americans all the information about coronavirus he himself had. Continue reading.