Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated President Trump’s management of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, dubbing him the “Olympic champion of lying.”
On MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” co-anchor Joe Scarborough said that just as documents revealed President George W. Bush’s administration downplayed negative health effects from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the first Trump administration did the same in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In journalist Bob Woodward’s 2020 book, “Rage,” Mr. Trump admitted in audio-recorded interviews that he deliberately downplayed the severity of COVID-19 to the American public, even while privately acknowledging it was deadly and airborne.
Mrs. Clinton, who ran as the Democratic nominee against Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, said, “That is exactly the lesson we did not learn.
“He lies about everything. He lies just for the sake of lying. But when it affects people’s health, when it affects their pocketbook, when it affects our soldiers and our Air Force and our Marines and our sailors and everybody in the Middle East — when it’s just lying that puts people’s lives at risk or makes life so much harder — that is something that the American people should not tolerate,” she said.
National security officials warned Mr. Trump in an Oval Office briefing in January 2020 that COVID-19 would be the biggest national security threat of his presidency and was as deadly as the 1918 flu.
In an audio-recorded interview that February, Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward that the coronavirus was airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” despite comparing it to the common flu.
The next month, the president told Mr. Woodward that he purposely chose to minimize the severity of the virus publicly, saying, “I wanted to always play it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.