JC Trump is really nutz
Bob Woodward said President Trump’s false claim at a town hall this week that he never sought to downplay the threat of the coronavirus shows Trump has “lost his way, not just as president but as a human being trying to assess what’s real and what’s unreal.”
In a wide-ranging live interview with Yahoo News Editor in Chief Daniel Klaidman and Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff for the “
Skullduggery” podcast Thursday, Woodward said Trump’s assertion during the ABC town hall that he “up-played” the threat of COVID-19 to Americans was “so confusing, it makes you dizzy.”
“This idea of up-playing, I don’t think that’s even a word,” Woodward said. “Now it will be in one of those slang dictionaries.”
In a Feb. 7 interview for Woodward’s new book, “
Rage,” Trump told him that he knew the virus — which has now
killed over 190,000 Americans — was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said, adding: “This is deadly stuff.”
But publicly, Trump sought to downplay the virus, which he acknowledged in another interview with Woodward on March 19.
“I wanted to always play it down,” he said. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”