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US President Donald Trump has defended his interview with journalist Bob Woodward. In the conversation, Trump admitted to deliberately downplaying the danger posed by the corona virus. “The last thing you want is to cause panic in the country,” he said now. “We want to show confidence, we want to show strength.” At the same time, he noted that he had taken steps such as restricting travel to China.
Trump’s challenger in the White House race, Joe Biden, lashed out at the president. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if Trump had acted faster, Biden said. “It was a life and death betrayal of the American people,” he also tweeted.
The CNN station had previously reported on the new Woodwards book and had also released short audio recordings of the interviews. You can hear Trump say, “I always wanted to downplay it. I still like to downplay it because I don’t want to panic.” The excerpt is from March 19.
Contradiction between interview and public statements
In a conversation on February 7, according to the recordings, Trump had already described the corona virus as “deadly.” People don’t have to touch contact surfaces to get infected: “You just breathe air and that’s how it spreads.” The disease is also “deadlier” than the flu, which kills 25,000 to 30,000 Americans each year, Trump said. “Who would have thought that right?”
Meanwhile, at a press conference at the White House in late February, Trump spoke of the importance of washing his hands frequently and not touching all the mangoes, and that he should treat the disease in the same way that he would treat the flu. At the same time, he publicly claimed that the death rate was lower than that of the flu.
Even before Trump’s statement, his spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany announced that the president had “never lied to the American public about Covid.” However, one of his tasks is to keep the population calm. “The president never played down the virus. The president radiated calm. He was hopeful,” McEnany said.
So far, about 190,000 people have died in the United States after being infected by the coronavirus.
