Investigative journalist Bob Woodward said former President Donald Trump acted criminally in how he downplayed COVID-19 early in the pandemic.
The Watergate sleuth, who obtained the admission from Trump while reporting for his book Rage, raised the prospect of illegal activity during a newly published interview. Pasadena Star-News columnist Doug McIntyre, who conducted a Distinguished Speaker Series interview with Woodward, asked about the level of Trump’s culpability as it relates to the health crisis, according to a write-up of the exchange.
“Turns out, his responsibility is absolute,” Woodward said. “He disclosed what he knew in a way that was criminal, actually, to say he knew all of this so early.”
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Trump participated in 18 interviews with Woodward for Rage, which was published in September 2020 by Simon & Schuster, and he faced a wave of backlash, particularly for his comments about downplaying the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in its earliest days in the first part of 2020. Not only did he reportedly hear from his top national security adviser that COVID-19 would become the biggest national security challenge of his presidency, but Trump told Woodward that the virus was “deadly stuff” and airborne at a time when he was telling the public that it was no worse than the seasonal flu and would soon disappear.
“It was a full ringing of the alarm bell, that this was going to be a pandemic, much worse than the SARS pandemic, which really didn’t strike the United States,” Woodward said. “Imagine you’re the president of the United States and you’re sitting in this top-secret briefing and [then-deputy national security adviser] Matt Pottinger, who’d been a Wall Street Journal reporter in China, a real expert on China, says, ‘I have contacts who tell me that 650,000 people are going to die in the United States from this.’ And that’s precisely what happened. Trump told me what he learned but didn’t tell the public and kept on this course of denial.”
Trump insisted to Woodward that he favored downplaying the virus because he did not want to “create a panic,” but some of his most ardent critics assailed him for playing down the dangers of COVID-19.
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Carl Bernstein, who helped expose the 1970s Watergate scandal in the Nixon administration with Woodward, previously said the revelations were “even graver than in Watergate” and revealed Trump’s “homicidal negligence” to prioritize political interests over a public health emergency. President Joe Biden, during his 2020 presidential campaign, said Trump’s response “cost lives” and was “almost criminal.”
“This is the failure of leadership because leadership has to tell the truth,” Woodward told McIntyre. “Trump could have mobilized the public and said, ‘I’ve been warned. I’m going to share that warning with you.’ But he failed to do that.”
