Trump audio shows he knew about COVID’s severity even as he misled public

On February 7 this year, President Donald Trump admitted in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward that the coronavirus was far more deadly than the flu even as Trump continued misleading the public about the pandemic's severity. In another interview on March 19, Trump told Woodward that he was intentionally downplaying the virus's severity. "I wanted to always play it down," Trump said.

Woodward's new book, Rage, is scheduled for release next week, but excerpts of the book along with recordings of Trump's interviews with Woodward became public today. This CNN article contains several audio clips from the interviews.

The audio excerpts came from 18 interviews between December 5, 2019 and July 21, 2020 that "were recorded by Woodward with Trump's permission," CNN wrote. In the February 7 interview, Trump noted that the flu kills 25,000 or 30,000 people a year in the United States. "This is more deadly," Trump then told Woodward, referring to the coronavirus. (So far, about 190,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.)

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