Trump: Bob Woodward Could’ve Saved Countless Lives If He’d Reported My Lies Sooner

When news broke on Wednesday that venerated reporter Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book had Donald Trump on record saying that he purposely downplayed the threat of COVID-19, despite knowing that it was “deadly stuff,” the outrage was deafening. The fury and disgust initially centered around the president’s decision to lie to the public about the fatal virus, proclaiming that it was nothing to worry about while knowing full well that it was. Later the conversation turned to Woodward’s decision to withhold crucial information, with some arguing that it was a dereliction of his duty as a journalist not to come forward and tell people, in real time, that the president was lying to their faces, as he instead saved it for his book. “There is no ethical or moral defense of Woodward’s decision to not publish these tapes as soon as they were made,” former BuzzFeed News Washington bureau chief John Stanton tweeted. “If there was any chance it could save a single life, he was obligated to do so. Bob Woodward put making money over his moral and professional duty.” “1000 times this,” one user responded. “Woodward had a moral obligation.” “If you don’t publish in a situation like this,” said another, “*why are you in journalism* to begin with?”

Joining the chorus on Thursday was Trump himself, who also wondered aloud why the Watergate reporter chose to sit on the story:

Of course that’s obviously not the reason Woodward didn’t publish Trump’s quotes sooner. Speaking to the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan, Woodward said he waited it out because (1) Trump is a habitual liar, and he hadn’t yet done the reporting necessary to know if the president was actually telling the truth in this instance, and (2) He wanted to put the statements into context and publish them closer to the election so that people didn’t forget about them on their way to the polls:

Woodward said his aim was to provide a fuller context than could occur in a news story: “I knew I could tell the second draft of history, and I knew I could tell it before the election.” (Former Washington Post publisher Phil Graham famously called journalism “the first rough draft of history.”) What’s more, he said, there were at least two problems with what he heard from Trump in February that kept him from putting it in the newspaper at the time: First, he didn’t know what the source of Trump’s information was. It wasn’t until months later—in May—that Woodward learned it came from a high-level intelligence briefing in January that was also described in Wednesday’s reporting about the book. In February, what Trump told Woodward seemed hard to make sense of, the author told me—back then, Woodward said, there was no panic over the virus; even toward the final days of that month, Anthony S. Fauci was publicly assuring Americans there was no need to change their daily habits. Second, Woodward said, “the biggest problem I had, which is always a problem with Trump, is I didn’t know if it was true.” … But why not then write such a story later in the spring, once it was clear that the virus was extraordinarily destructive and that Trump’s early downplaying had almost certainly cost lives? Again, Woodward said he believes his highest purpose isn’t to write daily stories but to give his readers the big picture—one that may have a greater effect, especially with a consequential election looming. Woodward’s effort, he said, was to deliver in book form “the best obtainable version of the truth,” not to rush individual revelations into publication. And always with a particular deadline in mind, so that people could read, absorb, and make their judgments well before November 3. “The demarcation is the election.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good idea to wait to tell people that the president of the United States was actively lying to them about a deadly disease, but just so we’re clear, that’s the new argument from Team Trump: This is all Bob Woodward’s fault.