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Trump Responds to Bob Woodward Tapes: 'We Don't Want to Be Crazed Lunatics'
Posted
September 11, 2020
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September 11, 2020
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0:27Now PlayingPresident Donald Trump tried to refocus attention from the Bob Woodward recordings to his Democratic rival at a rally in battleground Michigan Thursday, as he pushed to move past revelations that he purposefully played down the danger of the coronavirus last winter.
Before departing the White House, Trump denied he had lied to the nation as he continued to grapple with fallout from a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. In a series of interviews with Woodward, the president spoke frankly about the dangers posed by Covid-19 — even as he downplayed them publicly.
“They wanted me to come out and scream people are dying. We're dying,” said Trump. "We did it just the right way. We have to be calm. We don't want to be crazed lunatics. We have to lead."
President Donald Trump defended telling journalist Bob Woodward that he intentionally downplayed the severity of the coronavirus in public, saying he didn’t want to cause panic or price spikes.
“I wanted to always play it down, I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump told Woodward, the author and associate editor for the Washington Post, on March 19 in one of a series of interviews for his book, “Rage,” due for publication this month.
The revelations from Woodward’s book have led to accusations that Trump misled the American public about the severity of the virus. He told the author in an interview in February, when the U.S. had reported few cases of Covid-19, that the virus was more dangerous than the flu.
In public, meanwhile, he favorably compared coronavirus and the flu, noting that there were at the time many more flu deaths in the U.S. Asked whether he thought he could have saved lives if he had been more forthright, Trump said: “If we didn’t do what we did, we would have had millions die.”
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