President Trump’s reelection campaign said Thursday that he was not lying earlier this year when he publicly downplayed the threat of the coronavirus as he privately discussed its severity.
“The president has always said, and has said in public many times, that he views part of his job as being the leader of the country, is to calm people down and not to create a crisis and cause panic, and that’s exactly what he told Bob Woodward,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said Thursday on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”
The defense comes a day after excerpts were released from Bob Woodward’s upcoming book in which Trump said he “wanted to always play it down,” referring to the pandemic.
“I wanted to, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump said in a recording released by Woodward.
“It goes through the air,” Trump said in another part of the interview. “That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breath the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Murtaugh maintained the president was “not lying” and that he took strict action to battle the coronavirus’s spread, specifically citing Trump’s decision to restrict travel from China earlier this year.
“At the same time he was doing that, the administration was taking action,” he said. “You have to look at the totality of the record.”
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