Trump attacks Woodward over coronavirus comments

DONALD TRUMP has joined a chorus of criticism aimed at journalist Bob Woodward over why he waited more than six months to reveal the US president told him back in February coronavirus was “deadly” and worse than the flu.

Mr Woodward’s new book recounts how Mr Trump made the remarks during an interview on Feb 7, with audio of the conversation released on Wednesday ahead of the book’s publication.

It has seen Mr Trump accused by his political rivals of misleading the American people about the seriousness of the threat posed by Covid-19, given at the time he often compared the virus to the flu in public.

However the fallout has also seen criticism of Mr Woodward for not revealing the remarks sooner, saving it for his book. Mr Trump became the most prominent person to voice the criticism in a tweet yesterday, albeit in a way that was used to argue what he had said on Feb 7 was not actually controversial. He wrote: “Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months. If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives?”

Mr Woodward, one half of the reporting duo whose exclusives on the Watergate scandal helped bring down Richard Nixon, the then US president, talked to Mr Trump 18 times for his new book, Rage.

Mr Woodward told the Associated Press of the Feb 7 call; “He tells me this, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, but is it true?’ Trump says things that don’t check out, right?”

Mr Woodward said that it was not until May 2020 that he learnt of a January briefing where the president had been told about the seriousness of the virus. But by that stage the scale of threat posed by coronavirus was already apparent to the public, Mr Woodward argued.