Despite Media Uproar About Woodward Audio, In Public Trump Repeatedly Warned Of Coronavirus ‘Plague’

The tapes, first reported by CNN and exhaustively reported across corporate media as the biggest story of the election, show Trump telling the longtime Washington reporter over a series of interviews that he was aware of the threat level that the novel Wuhan coronavirus posed but was deliberately downplaying its severity to prevent public panic.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19, six days after declaring a national emergency. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

The comments, which Woodward didn’t release for months until right after the traditional marker of the general election campaign on Labor Day, were projected by Democrats and their allies in the media as the most damning revelation from the Trump White House less than two months before Nov. 3. Yet Trump had already said the same thing repeatedly in front of dozens of reporters on live television.