Journalist Bob Woodward is catching praise and grief this week from members of the press.
On the one hand, he is a hero for scoring the supposed scoop that President Trump knew in February of the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic but downplayed it anyway to avoid a panic. On the other hand, Woodward is a villain for sitting on a “bombshell” story for six months to maximize sales of his new book.
But in between, in that weird middle where apparently few journalists dare, there are those who feel neither joy nor anger, but déjà vu for what is an awfully familiar story. As it turns out, they are right to feel as if they have heard this one before. This exact news cycle played out earlier this year, on this issue specifically. Woodward just happens to be the beneficiary of the public’s short memory.
In one of the Watergate journalist’s recorded, on-the-record interviews with Trump, the president can be heard saying he knew long before the first confirmed COVID-19 death that the pandemic was extremely dangerous, contagious, and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president told Woodward on Feb. 7. “You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” adding elsewhere that “it goes away in two months with the heat.”
Later, on March 19, when asked to reconcile his private understanding of the virus with his public assurances, the president told Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”
In yet another interview in April, the president said, “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”
It would have been better had Trump acted more like Winston Churchill and admitted from the get-go that the pandemic would be difficult and deadly, but also manageable and temporary. Instead, he sold the public butterflies and daisies, making a liar and a fool of himself in the process.
But what is especially strange about the Woodward news cycle this week is, well, the lack of news. We don’t need the Woodward tapes to know that Trump downplayed what he understood to be a contagious and deadly disease. Trump himself admitted as much earlier this year.
In late March, as coronavirus fatalities stacked up, reporters asked Trump about his earlier claims that the virus would soon disappear with little effect on the population.
“I knew everything,” the president said at a March 31 White House press briefing. “I knew it could be horrible, and I knew it could be maybe good.”
He added, “I don’t want to be a negative person. It’d be so much easier for me to come up and say, ‘We have bad news. We’re going to lose 220,000 people, and it’s going to happen over the next few weeks.’”
Yet, on Feb. 26, Trump said coronavirus cases in the United States would be “close to zero” in a “couple of days.” And even earlier than that, on Jan. 22, he said, “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
On March 30, when asked at a White House press briefing about downplaying the virus, Trump said, “If you look at those individual statements, they’re all true. Stay calm. It will go away. You know it – you know it is going away, and it will go away. … The statements I made are: I want to keep the country calm. I don’t want to panic in the country.”
He added, “I could cause panic much better than even you. I could do much – I would make you look like a minor league player. But you know what? I don’t want to do that.”
Later, on March 31, the president remarked at another press briefing, “Somebody said, ‘Oh, I wish he’d be more negative.’ … Well, this is really easy to be negative about. But I want to give people hope too. You know, I’m a cheerleader for the country. We’re going through the worst thing that the country has probably ever seen.”
Trump was very open then, as he was with Woodward, that he whitewashed the seriousness of the outbreak because he did not want to inspire hysteria. At the time, the press acted accordingly. There was an entire news cycle with headlines such as, “Trump just acknowledged downplaying the coronavirus threat: ‘I knew it could be horrible.'”
If anything, the Woodward tapes only confirm what the president himself said in March when he admitted to soft-pedaling the virus despite understanding the dangers. In other words, when it comes to this week’s news cycle about Trump’s public rhetoric not matching his personal understanding of the pandemic and his saying that he downplayed the virus because he did not want to cause a panic, we have been here before. This is not news. Yet reporter Carl Bernstein, Woodward’s Watergate colleague, is out here claiming the newly released tapes from February, April, and May are supposedly worse than the Nixon tapes, which would be impressive for a twice-baked story.
In the Trump-era, journalists are apparently unable to remember anything.
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An earlier version of this story misreported the dates of the president’s March 30 and March 31 White House press briefings. We regret the error.
