Peril

by Bob Woodward

Scheduled for 45 minutes on the phone or Zoom, the oral briefings routinely extended to an hour and a half. Kessler and Murthy were both deeply alarmed by Trump’s attitude and failure to comprehend what he and the world were facing. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward in a March 2020 interview. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” Trump had tweeted earlier that month about his view: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” Trump shut down the country a week later, but almost immediately began talking about opening it back up. “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this,” Trump said on March 23, during a White House press briefing.