Bob
Woodward Finally Got Trump to Tell the Truth About COVID-19
Whatever the political
consequence, hearing the President’s cynical interview on tape is a revelation.
September 11, 2020
President Donald
Trump began the day on Wednesday engaged in a bout of
self-promotion, dreaming of the Nobel Peace Prize he might soon win. Delighted
with the news that a right-wing crank in the Norwegian parliament had nominated
him for the honor, Trump had the White House press secretary put out an
official statement that hailed the President’s “bold diplomacy and vision.”
Before 10 a.m., Trump
retweeted stories about the Nobel nomination—and congratulations to himself for
it—nearly two dozen times. I would not be surprised if he took particular
delight in the tweet he passed along from @RealMattCouch, a self-described
journalist and patriot: “Can you imagine the riots and temper tantrums from the
leftist mob when President Trump is re-elected and he wins the Nobel Peace
Prize in the same year . . . This is going to be glorious :)”
But,
of course, there will be no Nobel, nor will there be a Middle East peace deal
to end all peace deals, with Trump’s name emblazoned on it in gold. Do his
followers in the maga bubble
know this? Does Trump? By lunchtime, the fantasy was forgotten, or at least
temporarily set aside. Reality, in the form of the President’s own words, taped
by the journalist Bob Woodward with Trump’s permission, had intruded.
The coronavirus was
“deadly,” he had told Woodward, on February 7th, “more deadly than even your
strenuous flus.” As we now all know, Trump then spent the next month publicly
downplaying the danger, telling Americans the exact opposite of what he had
privately confided to Woodward. By March 19th, after finally being forced to
confront the reality of the escalating pandemic inside the United States, and
having declared a national emergency, Trump admitted to Woodward the scale of
his wintry deception. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said, according to
Woodward’s forthcoming new book, “Rage.” “I still like
playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” This, too, is on
tape, and as of Wednesday afternoon it was playing on a loop on CNN—the
President, in his own words, confirming his calculatedly cynical approach to a
public-health catastrophe that sometime in the next few days will have claimed
two hundred thousand American lives.
This
is one of those brutal weeks in the Trump Presidency—and there have been
many—when the facts revealed about the President are so painful that it is not
just his supporters in the Senate, perennially dodging reporters’ questions on
their way to lunch, who might prefer to look away. Among Democrats and the
liberal commentariat, there was the usual Woodward bashing: Why had he waited
so long to publish this damaging information? But there was also another
question: Will any of this new information matter, what
with Trump voters so locked into their support of the President that no
outrage, no matter how deadly, will sway them? For Trump’s defenders, it was
just another time to dodge and deflect. On Fox News, the host Tucker Carlson
opened his prime-time show with a long attack on Senator Lindsey Graham, the
Presidential confidant whom Carlson blamed for convincing Trump to coöperate
with Woodward. Carlson noted that Graham had sat in on the first interview, but
did not offer his viewers any explanation for why Trump conducted seventeen
subsequent interviews with Woodward.
I
found a certain emptiness to the exercise, to the partisan vaporings and
performative outrage of the political class. Everyone is suiting up for a
fight, and they all think they know its resolution: Trump will deny and
dissemble, and then some other thing will happen and the news cycle will move
on. The strategy from Trump and his partisans was quickly apparent; this is a
play they have run many times before. If the President can pretend the virus
that he had called “deadly” is, in fact, not so bad, then he certainly can
pretend that he never said those things to Woodward; that the book, like all
the other books, is just a “political hit job”; and that it’s irrelevant,
anyway, because he is doing such a terrific job and his enemies are terrible.
Sure
enough, by Thursday morning, Trump was back to demanding that Democrats reopen
schools, the coronavirus be damned. He was tweeting about his good friend Kim
Jong Un, planning to hold a campaign rally in Michigan, and complaining about
the “phony Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX.” A day after implausibly reacting to
the Woodward book by claiming that, in lying, he was just acting responsibly,
to avoid panicking the American public, Trump returned to scaring it. “If I
don’t win,” the President tweeted, “America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low
Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, ‘Friendly
Protesters’.”
Soon
after that tweet, I heard a thwack at the front door. My copy of the Woodward
book had arrived. Should I even bother to read it? In Trump’s nihilistic world,
nothing matters. There is no point, no truth that is not partisan. The election
is just under two months away. To Trump, that is all that counts. How will the
book, or any other book, for that matter, change its outcome? I thought about
all of that. I decided to start reading.
The
reviewers at the Times and the Washington Post have
already had their shots at Woodward’s book. His latest work has prompted as
much fury on their part at the cowardly group of sycophants and enablers
surrounding the President as at Trump himself. All of us already know that
Trump is a charlatan, a con man, a fool. But isn’t it infuriating that these
decorated generals and self-professed Christians have spoken privately with
Woodward but have refused to level with the American people? Perhaps it’s “a
tale not of character but of complicity,” as Jennifer Szalai wrote in the Times.
“What makes the book noteworthy is Woodward’s sad and subtle documentation of
the ego, cowardice and self-delusion that, over and over, lead intelligent
people to remain silent in the face of Trumpian outrages,” Rosa Brooks, a
Georgetown University law professor, concluded, in a review for
the Post.
It
is hard to disagree with their assessment. At times, you may slam the book down
in frustration as you read, yet again, about Trump’s enablers telling a
journalist how paranoid and narcissistic, foul-mouthed and foolish, the
President is. These are people who have worked closely with him, and who
apparently believe that Trump is a mortal danger to the nation, but they never
say anything about him to the public. Still, the problem is this: as enraging
and perplexing as their self-imposed silences and self-serving leaks appear to
be, Jim Mattis and Dan Coats and all the rest are not running for President.
They are, in the end, not responsible for the follies of the Trump Presidency,
any more than Bob Woodward is responsible for the outrageous things that Trump
told him. Does anyone seriously believe that, had Woodward published an article
based on his February phone call with the President, Trump would have chosen
any different course of action toward the pandemic? At every step along the
way, the President has been called on his public misstatements and untruths
about the virus. It did not make one bit of difference. Trump is unrepentant,
now and forever.
By late Thursday
afternoon, the Woodward news cycle had made its inevitable way to a Trump press
conference, the ritual moment wherein the President would denounce the book,
deny wrongdoing, and say a whole lot of other words.
“Why
did you lie to the American people?” the ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl
asked, when Trump gave him the first question.
“There’s
no lie,” Trump responded. “And the way you asked that question is very
disgraceful.”
Perhaps
even more to the point, Trump repeated, over and over, that what he told
Woodward essentially does not matter. Because America’s response to the
coronavirus has been right, terrific, amazing. Better than Europe. Better than
anywhere. “I think we did a great job,” he told Karl. And also, “We’re rounding
the final turn.” The pandemic, to hear Trump tell it, is practically over.
This
is the same mix of fantasy and lies that Trump was spreading publicly in
February, while privately telling Woodward the truth about the coronavirus’s
deadliness. The difference is that nearly two hundred thousand Americans are
dead now, and few of them had any inkling that their lives would soon be in
danger because the President chose neither to tell the country the truth nor
take actions that would empower the government to properly respond to a
pandemic of this scale and lethality.
Will
it make any difference in the election? I doubt it. But the awfulness of the
latest Trump revelations is no less awful for having been both anticipated and
completely consistent with what we already suspected. In fact, it might be even
worse than a surprise bolt from nowhere. Through sheer repetition, Trump has
defeated the idea of the game-changing disclosure. Just in the past few days,
weeks, and months, we’ve learned that his former national-security adviser
considered him “unfit” for office; that his first defense secretary called him
“dangerous”; that his first director of National Intelligence thought Vladimir
Putin must have had damaging kompromat on him; and that his
own sister was secretly taped saying that he was a “cruel” man “with no principles.”
None
of these disclosures significantly altered the landscape of American politics
in this election year. Why would it change anything to know how cynical Trump
has been with American lives—to have the confirmation of what you already knew
and believed? By now, that’s the thing about these disclosures: the awfulness
is not only in the knowing but in the instantaneous awareness that the knowing
probably doesn’t much matter. It just makes it a bit more awful.