Bob Woodward says U.S. President Donald Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a “presidential negligence” that the United States has “never seen.”
“It is a history of presidential negligence on a scale which is — I’ve written about presidents for 50 years — they’ve never seen,” Woodward told CTV Question Period Host Evan Solomon in an exclusive interview, airing Sunday.
Woodward, a Washington Post journalist and bestselling author, interviewed Trump more than a dozen times for a new book on the president, “Rage.”
In the new book, Trump is quoted describing COVID-19 as “deadly stuff” and highly contagious. Trump made these comments to Woodward in early February — a time when he was publicly downplaying the disease, claiming it’s no worse than the flu.
“He was told [COVID-19] was going to be like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in this country. And so he failed to exercise his duty to protect the people,” Woodward told Solomon.
He explained that Trump was aware of the severity of the situation in late January.
