-- Investigative journalist Bob Woodward's new book over U.S.'s response to COVID-19, titled "Rage", is due to be out next Tuesday.
-- The book showed that Trump admitted to downplaying the severity of the situation.
-- Voters' opinion on which candidate is more competent in handling the crisis will be a crucial determinant of the election.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump's response to COVID-19 has been under heightened scrutiny after journalist Bob Woodward revealed that he deliberately misled the public on the severity of the pandemic.
Woodward, known for the historic uncovering of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of former President Richard Nixon, will have his new book "Rage" released next Tuesday.
Trump rushed to his defense shortly after news about the book came, holding press briefings for two consecutive days to denounce allegations that he knowingly lied to the American people about the lethality of COVID-19.
Yet, the president's indisputable effort to mislead the public has not only distorted the facts surrounding the virus and its global spread, but also made infections and deaths that could have been avoided inevitable.
"DEADLY STUFF"
"This is deadly stuff," Trump was quoted by Woodward in the book as saying on the phone with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist as early as Feb. 7 about the coronavirus, describing the virus as airborne, thus "more deadly than even your strenuous flus."
On Feb. 27, however, the president told a group of African American leaders at a White House meeting that the virus "is going to disappear. It's like a miracle." He repeated similar expressions publicly 33 times from the start of the outbreak to mid-August, according to a count by The Washington Post.
Woodward's book also showed that Trump admitted to downplaying the severity of the situation -- and vowed to continue doing so -- in order not to create national panic.
"I wanted to always play it down," the president told Woodward on March 19. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."
Photo taken on Aug. 10, 2020 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States.(Xinhua/Liu Jie)
As furor over his deception heated to a boil, Trump convened a press briefing Wednesday at the White House to whitewash his error, claiming "I didn't lie."
Then on Thursday, the president reiterated to reporters his intention to calm the nation down. "The fact is, there has to be a calmness. You don't want me jumping up and down screaming there's going to be great death. There's going to ... really causing serious problems for the country," he said.
It is also worth noting that Woodward faces criticism for failing to release Trump's remarks right after he finished the altogether 18 interviews with the president in March.
David Boardman, dean of the Temple University journalism school, questioned in a tweet whether it is ethical from a journalistic point of view to "save juicy information for a book."
"I knew I could tell the second draft of history, and I knew I could tell it before the election," Woodward was quoted by The Washington Post as saying in an interview, adding that he needed extra time to verify the source and truthfulness of the information he was told by Trump.
People are seen on the outdoor square marked to remind people of keeping social distancing in Hudson Yards in New York City, the United States, Sept. 9, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)
BLAMING OTHERS
Up until now, Trump has been insistent that the United States was in a good shape and would have remained that way had it not been for the arrival of what he biasedly called "the China virus," and that China should have prevented the virus from spreading beyond its borders.
By bashing China -- and given Woodward's revelations, people will have to second guess if this is the president's deliberate strategy -- he turned a blind eye to the fact that China, which was one of the first countries to study the novel coronavirus and informed the international community of its findings, engaged in an all-out effort to fight the pandemic by prioritizing people's lives and championing international cooperation in the face of this common threat.
Trump was also incapable of acknowledging the truth that shifting blames not only was of no help whatsoever in dealing with the crisis he faced at home, but also wasted the critical time during the early stage when tens of thousands of needlessly lost lives could have been saved had appropriate remedies been prescribed.
An electronic screen shows an advertisement calling for plasma donation from patients recovered from COVID-19 on Times Square in New York, the United States, Aug. 19, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)
"The fact that the United States suffers the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world is in large part the result of our own leaders' actions and inactions," Washington-based think tank the Brookings Institution said in an article carried on Aug. 19. "Blaming China without also blaming ourselves is not an honest reckoning," it added.
Some countries, "including the United States," the Brookings said, "did not adopt aggressive testing, contact tracing, social distancing, and other measures that China successfully deployed to contain spread outside Wuhan, even after Chinese authorities and scientists confirmed human-to-human transmission on Jan. 20, locked Wuhan down on Jan. 23, and warned in a Jan. 24 Lancet paper of a 'novel coronavirus outbreak of global health concern.'"
"The more important point, however, is that the blame game has been and remains a serious distraction from the essential and difficult work needed to control this terrible disease," read the Brookings article.
Those words should serve as a wake-up call for the president, who The Nation magazine warned in an op-ed Thursday "will continue to lie, and Americans will continue to die."
Photo taken on Sept. 9, 2020 shows the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
DEMOCRATS' ATTACK
The president's attempt to alter the narrative came less than eight weeks before the presidential election which has been fundamentally reshaped by the unprecedented pandemic. As a consequence, voters' opinion on which candidate is more competent in handling the crisis will be a crucial determinant of the election result.
Joe Biden, a former U.S. vice president and now Trump's rival in the upcoming election, seized on reports of the book to attack Trump on Wednesday, saying at an event in Michigan that the incumbent president "had the information. He knew how dangerous it was. And while this deadly disease ripped through our nation, he failed to do his job on purpose. It was a life-and-death betrayal of the American people."
The president's failure to act, Biden said, is "beyond despicable. It's a dereliction of duty, a disgrace. He knew how deadly it was. He knew and purposely played it down. Worse, he lied."
Pedestrians walk past a store for lease in New York, the United States, Sept. 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)
Trump fired back at the Democratic nominee by reminding reporters of what he said was Biden's mishandling of the swine flu during the Obama presidency.
"When Joe Biden was vice president, his failed approach to the swine flu was disastrous," he said. "And now he's telling us how to manage? He can't manage himself."
The president also slammed his opponent's decision to seek a "blanket lockdown" to stop the spread of the virus. Biden has said he would shut the country down again if scientists and public health experts deemed that necessary in coping with the pandemic.
During a trip to Florida -- her first campaign stop as Democratic vice presidential candidate -- Kamala Harris tried to exploit revelations from Woodward's book to convince voters that Biden, not Trump, will be the one to lead the American people out of the pandemic.
Addressing the audience at the Florida Memorial University, Harris admonished Trump, who she said "has the unique and very important and special responsibility of concerning himself with keeping the American people safe," for calling the coronavirus "a hoax" and dismissing "the seriousness of it to the point he suggested people should not wear masks."
"This is an individual who is not concerned about the health, safety and well-being of the American people and is frankly engaged in a reckless disregard of the lives and well-being of the people of our country," She told the crowd at the historically Black college that she found the president's behavior "so outrageous."
Florida became the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States this summer as the virus caused more than 12,000 deaths and 650,000 infections in just six months.
UNCONTROLLED VIRUS
The Woodward revelations came when the U.S. COVID-19 death toll was approaching the grim milestone of 200,000 and the total caseload topping 6.4 million as of Friday afternoon, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
"At this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response," read an article carried by the Time magazine on Thursday.
"Although America's problems were widespread, they start at the top. A complete catalog of President Donald Trump's failures to address the pandemic will be fodder for history books," it said.
Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies at a House subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., the United States, July 31, 2020. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool via Xinhua)
The daily death rate in the United States would reach nearly 3,000 in December, compared to the daily average of some 1,000 now, according to a recent projection by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Some 225,000 more deaths are expected to occur from now until the end of the year, it said, bringing the total fatality number to 410,000 in January next year.
Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious disease expert, said on Friday that he disagrees with Trump's argument made the previous day that the United States is "rounding the corner" in curbing the spread of the virus.
He told MSNBC in an interview that the current U.S. coronavirus data are "disturbing," warning of a "more precarious situation" this fall and winter.
(Video reporters: Hu Yousong, Tan Yixiao; Video editor:Zheng Xin)■
