The NPR Politics Podcast - On Tape: President Trump Admits To Downplaying The Pandemic

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

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.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, this is Frankie DiCiaccio in DeKalb, Illinois, where I have just finished filling out my materials to become a 2020 election judge or poll worker. This podcast was recorded at... That is a very important job in any year, and especially this year. It is 3.06 Eastern on Wednesday, September 9th. Things have possibly, probably, almost certainly, 100% definitely changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House.

And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And we're taping this an hour later than we usually do because things certainly changed from what we expected the day to be like today. President Trump knowingly misled the country he leads about the risks of the coronavirus pandemic. That is the top line of Bob Woodward's new book. Excerpts began to trickle out from today. On February 7th, when there were still fewer than 15 cases diagnosed in the U.S., here is what President Trump told Bob Woodward in an interview. The audio is provided by The Washington Post. It's also more deadly than your, you know, your even your strenuous flus. You know, people don't realize we lose twenty five thousand,

thirty thousand people a year here. Who would ever think that right now in public at the time, the president did acknowledge the virus was serious, but he repeatedly told Americans it was going to go away soon. Here he is on February 26th. When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. There are a lot of statements, a lot of tweets from February and March that are pretty similar to that. But in March, Trump again told Woodward in an interview on tape that he was intentionally downplaying the virus. Well, I think, Bob, really, to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down. Yes. Because I don't want to create a panic. Saisha, Ron, here we are seven months later, 190,000 Americans dead. There is no end in sight to this. This seems to count to me, even in the world we live in an era where it seems like there are things happening all the time and doesn't anything really matter. But I think this could matter. And if nothing else, it will have a big effect on the election.

And now you have basically the message that former Vice President Joe Biden had been trying to make about President Trump, you know, and his handling of the coronavirus. You have Trump saying it himself, saying, I was playing it down. Now, he says he wasn't trying to create a panic, but he says, I wanted to play it down. And the stuff about the flu, it's more deadly than the flu when he's over and over again was comparing it publicly and not making that point. Right. And that's a message that sunk in with a lot of his supporters that this wasn't something to rearrange your life for. Now, Ron, since you reviewed the book for NPR, you're one of probably at this point a handful of people in the country who have actually read the full book. Is there any nuance these headlines and quotes are missing? Or did this seem to be an intentional decision in the early weeks and months. The book actually begins, the first sentence of the prologue talks about an Oval Office meeting on January, now we're talking January 28th, where the top two people on the National Security Agency team, that is the National

Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien, and his top deputy sat there and told the president, this is not only going to be a big deal, this is going to be the biggest challenge of your presidency. And they didn't even need to add the biggest challenge to your re-election. That was implicit. So the president sits there, he listens to this, and according to the witnesses who had spoken to Woodward, his head pops up and he's paying attention. It's not like he missed it. And yet, in the days thereafter, he continued to talk the way he did, the way we heard him, the way we all heard him, all the way through February. On the next to last day of February, he was still saying that the way the Democrats were reacting was just all a hoax. It was just the way that they were

picking up something new after impeachment had failed. And that's all there was to it. And the people who were at that rally in South Carolina where he was saying that came away saying they thought the whole thing was a hoax. They thought that the whole virus was a media creation. And that's where we were back as recently as March. Our colleague, Franco Ordonez, he pressed White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany about this during the briefing today, about that very scene that you're talking about, Ron. How is it not misleading for his advisers to tell him and compare this virus potential to the Spanish flu of 1918, but then for the president to say that this could disappear by April. The president, again, was expressing calm. The president was hopeful that, you know, COVID

would, that we would be able to manage this and handle it in a way that we can make it go away as quickly as possible. So, you know, so as soon as this story happened, it was it was probably pretty easy to guess what Joe Biden would have to say about it. He was campaigning in Michigan today. And at the beginning of his speech, he said that the president, quote, knowingly and willingly lied about the threat this posed to the country for months. He had the information. He knew how dangerous it was. And Biden went on to argue that we are still living throughout the country with the consequences of the White House's decision to downplay this. This is a recession created by Donald Trump's negligence, and he is

unfit for this job as a consequence of it. How many schools aren't open right now? How many kids are starting a new school year the same way they ended the last one at home? How many parents feel abandoned and overwhelmed? How many frontline workers are exhausted and pushed to their limits? And how many families are missing loved ones at their dinner table tonight because of his failures. And I can imagine we'll be hearing a lot more of these quotes that the president gave Bob Woodward, including most likely in advertisements in key states very, very soon. If not, by the time you hear this podcast, depending where you live. We're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, we will talk more about this book and what we can and cannot guess about how it'll play out in the election. using two powerful tools, guns and Facebook. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Join us for the No Compromise podcast from NPR. And we're back. Ron, like I said, you have read the whole book already. There was a lot more material in here. Aside from how the president has handled the coronavirus, what else jumped out to you? One thing that jumps out is the stepping out of James Mattis, the former defense secretary, who has been extraordinarily reticent and reluctant to criticize the president, even after the manner in which they parted ways.

Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence, who found out he was fired while he was playing golf on one of Donald Trump's courses. And to a lesser degree, some other people, including Rex Tillerson, although we mostly see him through information that seems to be coming from James Mattis. Woodward has a pretty good reputation for making these books stand up, even though there's often controversy about his use of quotations and his attribution policies. So those things, I think, are eye-catching. There's also some pretty amazing quotations from Lindsey Graham, who is a big Trump ally in the Senate, a Republican from South Carolina. He talks about weeding out wackos among the president's nominees for federal judgeships,

even on the way to confirming 300 such nominees. And he also talks a little bit about how he didn't like the president walking across Lafayette Park after the police on horseback had cleared the park of protesters and standing with a Bible in front of St. John's Church. And the president supposedly said to, according to Lindsey Graham, said to him, the Christians liked it. And Lindsey Graham responded, well, I may not be a good Christian, but I am a Christian and I didn't like it. Aisha, we did episode and episode and episode over the last few weeks about how the president was having a lot of success reframing the conversation around these protests,

the violence that had sprung out. There's a lot of evidence that may not have been working, but he's really been on the defensive since late last week, that Atlantic story, quoting, unlike this book, anonymous sources saying that the president had repeatedly disparaged troops, questioned the point of serving in the military, fighting in wars. Now this, we seem to be in a full on Trump defensive, getting angry about articles about him, you know, period of the campaign. Yes. And it's not it's not slowing down. And there are questions about whether that law and order message was having the intended impact. But that's definitely the type of conversation that Trump wants to have. He does not want to have a conversation about the handling of the coronavirus unless it's about, you know, a cure or something like that.

Certainly not rehashing March and April. I mean, and over the summer, I mean, we saw some of his lowest polling marks because of people were so upset about the handling of the coronavirus. You know, I think we should end on something, an acknowledgement of what we don't know, right? I know that people like to listen to this podcast to get a sense of what we don't know, right? I know that people like to listen to this podcast to get a sense of what's going to happen, what to make sense of things. But there are moments where we just have no idea what's going to happen, right? You could fill up a Bob Woodward-sized book with controversies that really dominated the headlines for a few days and then just seem to go away or go back into people's preconceptions of this election. Like, we just

don't know what effect this is going to have. We don't. And, you know, we're not fortune tellers. And I think that this is a really, I mean, we always, we keep talking about unprecedented and all of it, but this is really an unprecedented time. And we don't know how much people had already baked in their expectations about or how they felt about President Trump's handling of the coronavirus? Does this solidify things? Is this something that will, you know, make those very few people who, you know, Mara Eliason always talks about those very few people who are undecided.

Will this affect them? We really don't know that. But it is a serious thing. Obviously, we have almost 200,000 people in the U never be the same because of the educational environment. That is what we do know. This has had a huge impact. Their parents. I'm one of them. This has had a huge impact on this country. But we do not know what will happen. But the other thing to bear in mind is that there is an overload factor here. We've heard from Michael Cohen. We've heard from John Bolton. We've heard from Melania Trump's best friend. We've heard from people who have book after book. And I'm not saying any of them

is not legitimate. I'm not saying that they lack reason to write these books. But why are they all coming out right now? Because obviously the authors and publishers know that books about Donald Trump are at their maximum marketability at this moment and might be precipitously less marketable if he should lose in November. So we're getting a big rush of them. Plus, I think a lot of these authors have the very direct purpose of Mary Trump, the niece, the daughter of his older brother. you know, she's really trying to warn the country about this man that she feels she knows very, very well, her uncle. And I think a lot of these authors are trying to bring the same message. It's certainly clear enough in Bob Woodward's conclusion, when he says that he has simply reached the conclusion that Donald Trump

is not the man for the job. Yeah. All right, Ron, thank you for your speed reading. Yes. Wish I could have had it in college. Ron's review of the book, in addition to all of our reporting on it, is up at NPR.org. That's it for today. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign.

I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'misha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, speed reader. It's a good skill to have. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.