On Tape: President Trump Admits To Downplaying The Pandemic

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2020

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump was aware of the severity of the coronavirus in early February, telling Bob Woodward that it was much more severe than the flu. In public, Trump used the flu comparison in a different way: highlighting the flu's high seasonal death toll compared to the few dozen early cases of coronavirus.

He admitted to Woodward in March that he was intentionally downplaying the pandemic in order to avoid panic.

Those revelations are contained in Woodward's new book Rage.

The United States death toll from the disease will likely top 200,000 by the end of the month.

This episode: campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Frankie Dichacho in DeCalb, Illinois, where I have just finished filling out my
0:05.2	materials to become a 2020 election judge or poll worker. This podcast was recorded at.
0:11.3	That is a very important job in any year and especially this year. It is 306 Eastern on Wednesday,
0:18.3	September 9th. Things have possibly, probably, almost certainly 100 percent definitely changed by
0:23.3	the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show.
0:26.4	Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Scott Detro. I cover the presidential campaign.
0:34.0	I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, Editor of Correspondent.
0:38.7	And we're taping this an hour later than we usually do because things certainly changed
0:43.1	from what we expected the day to be like today. President Trump, knowingly, misled the country,
0:48.6	he leads about the risks of the coronavirus pandemic. That is the top line of Bob Woodward's new book
0:54.9	excerpts began to trickle out from today. On February 7th, when there were still fewer than 15
1:00.9	cases diagnosed in the US, here is what President Trump told Bob Woodward in an interview.
1:06.6	The audio is provided by the Washington Post. It's also more deadly than your, you know,
1:13.2	your even your strenuous flus. You know, people don't realize we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year
1:19.4	here. Who would ever think that, right? Now in public at the time, the president did acknowledge
1:24.0	the virus was serious, but he repeatedly told Americans it was going to go away soon. Here he is
1:30.3	on February 26th. When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be
1:35.9	down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. There are a lot of statements,
1:42.3	a lot of tweets from February and March that are pretty similar to that. But in March,
1:46.7	Trump again told Woodward in an interview on tape that he was intentionally downplaying the virus.
1:52.9	Well, I think Bob really, to be honest with you, I wanted to, I wanted to always play it down.
2:01.3	I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic. So Aisha, Ron, here we are
	...

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