Bob Woodward’s Newest Novel Reveals President Trump’s Latest Controversy
Image Courtesy of the LA Times
By Fernando Cordova
Recently released on September 15, Bob Woodward’s latest book Rage has spurred the latest controversy of Donald Trump’s presidency.
In this sequel to his 2018 novel Fear: Trump in the White House, Woodward takes into account Trump’s actions and policymaking in a series of interviews with the President himself and administration officials. Two of the interviews detailed in the book pertain to Trump and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In one phone interview on March 19, the president admitted to downplaying the pandemic, despite knowing the seriousness of the virus in the first place.
“I always wanted to play it down, I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump said.
In addition to the interviews detailed in the book, recordings of the interviews given by Woodward were released on September 9 by the Washington Post. In a recording of an interview given on February 7, Trump recalled a conversation he had regarding the virus with Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to the interview, President Trump referred to the coronavirus as “deadly stuff,” contradicting his statements made to the country at the time in which he said that the virus was no more harmful than the seasonal flu. Also mentioned in the interview is the fact President Trump knew at the time that the virus was airborne, despite initial reports detailing that it wasn’t.
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said.
The backlash that Trump received from the release of Woodward’s book and the audio recordings of the interviews by the Washington Post confirmed what many of his critics already believed: he was continuously downplaying the seriousness of the virus. In a recent article published by Business Insider, Carl Bernstein, Woodward’s fellow journalist in reporting the Watergate scandal, was quoted saying that these new revealings by the Washington Post and in the book Rage are “graver than Watergate,” going as far to say that Trump’s downplaying of the pandemic was “a kind of homicidal negligence.” Given the release of the recordings and details of Woodward’s book, one can assume that Berstein is speaking from experience.
In addition to Bernstein’s criticism, Trump is facing backlash for the audio recordings and the book from both sides of the aisle.
“A little bit of alarm about the seriousness early on could have made a little bit of difference,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) said in a recently released statement.
Usually a supporter of the president’s policies, Sen. Rubio pointed out that if the president had spoken truthfully about the virus from the beginning, the country would be in much better circumstances. On the other side, Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden stepped up his criticism of Trump’s handling of the pandemic by saying that the president “failed to do his job on purpose,” furthering his attacks on his opponent ahead of the November general election.
Despite the backlash and criticism that President Trump has received due to his downplaying of the virus, it’s hard to tell whether this political fallout will have an effect on the 2020 election. What is certain is that controversy of any kind has been with the virus ever since the pandemic began.
