"This is going to be the biggest threat to national security of his tenure," his adviser Robert O'Brien warned him about the coronavirus in a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on January 28, as admitted by President Donald Trump, in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward included in his new book.
"It's going to be the hardest thing I ever deal with," added O'Brien, National Security Advisor.
Its
number two
, Matthew Pottinger, added that, after talking to China, it was clear that this health emergency was on par with the 1918 flu, which killed nearly 50 million people around the world.
[This has been Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic and the sequence of mistakes that led him to ignore the urgency]
The coronavirus has infected 6.5 million people in the United States and killed 190,000;
Around the world there are almost 28 million registered cases and 900,000 deaths.
From the outset, Trump chose to downplay the pandemic in his public appearances, comparing it to the flu or assuring that it would disappear in the summer and that it was completely under control.
The US registers almost 44,500 new infections by coronavirus in one day
Sept.
6, 202000: 42
However, privately at the same time admitting the opposite: "Just breathing the air and that's how it spreads," he told Woodward on February 7, "it's very complicated, it's very delicate, and it's a lot more lethal than a bad flu ”.
[A journalistic investigation reports that Trump called the soldiers who died in combat "losers". The president denies it]
"It's deadly," he added, according to the journalist's account, who recorded the conversations (they can be heard in The Washington Post).
On March 19, Trump admitted (and has also been recorded on tape): "To be honest, I've always wanted to downplay it."
Woodward's book, which is titled
Rage
, is made from 18 interviews that the journalist and the president conducted between December and July, agreeing that its content would not be secret.
Trump criticizes his Democratic rivals in full conference on coronavirus
Aug. 19, 202000: 53
It also addresses other issues, such as racism and social justice.
On June 3, two days after federal agents charged peaceful protesters to allow the president to take an election photograph next to a Washington church, Trump told the journalist about the anti-racism protests: “We are going to prepare to send to the Army - the National Guard some of these poor bastards who don't know what they are doing, these poor radical leftists ”.
[Former attorney Michael Cohen calls Trump a racist "cult leader" and says he despised Obama and other black leaders]
Asked by the journalist, he denied, with mockery, feeling that, as a white man, he would have been privileged all his life in front of minorities such as blacks or Hispanics.
He did acknowledge, however, that "unfortunately" there is racism in the United States.
And in a subsequent conversation, he lamented "not feeling any love" from black voters, despite "having done tremendously much" for that community.
The book also deals with the president's relationship with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, and how he approached the negotiations for nuclear disarmament as if it were a real estate issue: “It's like, you know, if someone is in love with their house. and he just doesn't want to sell it. "
Trump recalls his first meeting with Kim, on June 12, 2018 in Singapore, where he said he was surprised by the intelligence of the dictator.
And he shares with the journalist some of the letters that the North Korean leader wrote him (not the ones he wrote, which are "top secret," he said), in which he compares their meeting as "a scene from a fantasy movie", he calls him "His Excellency," and showers him with bombastic adulation.
Speaking about North Korea, the president further reveals: “I have built a nuclear weapons system like no one in this country has ever had.
We have things you've never seen or heard of.
We have things that Putin and Xi [referring to the leaders of Russia and China, respectively] have never heard of before.
There is no one… what we have is incredible ”.
The journalist adds that anonymous sources confirmed to him afterwards that the Pentagon has a new weapons system, without clarifying what it consists of, and were surprised that Trump had revealed it.