Washington Journalist Bob Woodward on Tuesday said in all of his years reporting on nine different presidents, he has “never seen anything like” President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic.
“Two hundred thousand Americans dying. I think in covering nine presidents, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Woodward told Jeff Zucker, the chairman of WarnerMedia News and Sports, at the Citizen by CNN 2020 conference.
“The visitation of the medical nightmare on the American population is staggering, stunning. It’s on his head, and he did not do enough. He just didn’t,” Woodward said.
Weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death in the United States, Trump admitted he knew that the virus was dangerous, airborne and highly contagious but repeatedly played it down publicly, Woodward reports in his new book, “Rage.” The President’s admissions, which are recorded on tape, stand in stark contrast to his public comments at the time insisting the virus would “disappear.”
Woodward said Trump has failed to build a team around him, and that he “harasses people” and “attacks people who work for him.”
“This impulse decision-making, I’ve never seen anything like it in the presidency or any other institution where it’s this one man band and he’s going to say and do exactly what he wants, often giving no warning to his closest aides,” Woodward said.
Woodward drew a contrast between Trump and former President Richard Nixon, who resigned after the Watergate political scandal in the 1970’s. The Washington Post published a story by Carl Bernstein and Woodward in October 1972 stating that the FBI believed aides to Nixon were responsible for the break-in that occurred at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC.
“Nixon was a criminal president, and he was driven out of office by the Republican Party. His people used to say no one died at Watergate, and there’s a certain truth to that. Two hundred thousand people have died at this, and Trump, by taking remedial action by being honest with the American people, which I — he just didn’t understand, does not understand the people he leads,” Woodward said.
Asked to compare the audio tapes of Nixon during Watergate and Trump, Woodward responded: “As a reporter for The New York Times said, it’s almost, in the case of Trump, as if Nixon had packaged up all his secret tape recordings showing his criminality and FedEx’ed them to me.”
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