US president discussed disease with China’s Xi Jinping and was aware of danger, journalist Bob Woodward reveals in new book.
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Quint Forgey on politico.com on September 9, 2020.
US President Donald Trump acknowledged the “deadly” nature of the coronavirus earlier this year in a series of recorded interviews with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, even as the White House sought to dismiss the disease’s threat to Americans amid its initial outbreak across the United States.
Recounting a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump told Woodward on February 7 that the coronavirus is “more deadly than your, you know, your – even your strenuous flus”.
“This is more deadly,” he added. “This is five per – you know, this is 5 per cent versus 1 per cent and less than 1 per cent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”
Woodward conducted 18 on-the-record interviews with the president between last December and July to gather material for the veteran journalist’s forthcoming book on the Trump White House.
Excerpts of those conversations were published on Wednesday by The Washington Post and CNN, including an exchange between Trump and Woodward in which the president revealed he was eager to play down the coronavirus outbreak so as not to alarm Americans.
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down,” Trump said in a March 19 interview. “Because I don’t want to create a panic.”
The damaging recordings come in the final weeks of a general election campaign which has seen the coronavirus emerge as the most important issue to voters, and as the White House is already deflecting reports of Trump making disparaging remarks about the US military and America’s war dead.
The new interviews include a variety of other explosive statements from the president on issues of racial justice, foreign affairs and national defence – with Trump revealing that he had “built a nuclear – a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before”.
“We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody – what we have is incredible,” Trump told Woodward, whose sources confirmed that the military had developed a secret new weapons system, according to The Washington Post.
The president also reportedly makes denigrating comments about his own military officials that echo other media accounts of his frustration with the Pentagon’s top brass.
Trump told White House trade adviser Peter Navarro that “my f*****g generals are a bunch of p*****s” who “care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals”, Woodward reported.