The events of the past week have confirmed again the old Washington adage that, when scandal erupts, the cover-up is generally worse than what is being concealed.
That was certainly true in the mid-1970s scandal known as Watergate when President Richard Nixon's secret tapes revealed he ordered the FBI and the CIA to cover up the break-in by his campaign operatives into Democratic Party headquarters.
Facing sure impeachment and conviction, Nixon resigned.
Two decades later, the reason House Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton was not because of his sexual affair with a White House intern but because he lied to conceal it before a grand jury.
Republicans defending Nixon used to argue that nobody died at Watergate. That is certainly not the case with the latest presidential cover-up, President Donald Trump's admission in his taped interviews with Bob Woodward that he knew early on about the dire effect of the novel coronavirus but withheld that information from the American people.
In this case, not only has another American president been exposed as lying to the American people, but Trump's failure to disclose what he knew when he knew it may have cost American lives.
And his efforts to minimize the pandemic are continuing today.
Several academic studies estimated the number of lives lost due to delayed governmental action, but that is hard to do with precision. Still, it's reasonable to ask, had Trump told Americans in early February what he told Woodward, would the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic be lower than it is, approaching 200,000 lives and headed higher?
Trump typically has hardly been contrite about his March 21 statement to Woodward that "I always wanted to play it down...because I didn't want to create a panic." Indeed, he has stepped up his rhetoric, suggesting recently in Michigan that admitting the truth would have made his administration seem like "crazed lunatics."
That explanation hardly rings true, given Trump's frequently overwrought warnings about allegedly impending disasters, often far beyond the facts. They include his frequent 2018 alarms about invading caravans of illegal immigrants and his recent forecast that, "if I don't win, America's suburbs will be OVERRUN with low income projects, anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, 'Friendly Protesters.'"
Besides, Woodward's disclosures in his new book "Rage" were not the only Trump cover-ups that surfaced last week.
In another case, according to a report initially in Politico, Trump political appointees pressured the Centers for Disease Control to review and change scientific reports on the extent of the virus to prevent it from undermining Trump's optimistic characterizations of progress against the virus.
In a third, a Department of Homeland Security whistle-blower contended that security officials were directed by the agency's political appointees to stop reporting on Russian threats to interfere in the U.S. election because it "made President Trump look bad."
That surfaced after the new director of national intelligence, former Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, suspended in-person security briefings to members of the congressional oversight committees on election security issues, a move widely seen as designed to prevent their questioning the extent of foreign interference, especially from Russia.
But these pale alongside Trump's ongoing effort to cover up the dangers posed by the novel coronavirus that began to arrive in the United States from China soon after the start of 2020. Though initially warned about its dangers in late January, Trump downplayed them for weeks, suggesting repeatedly that it posed no real threat to Americans and would vanish with the onset of warm weather.
But the Woodward tape recordings show that, as early as Feb. 7, Trump acknowledged "this is deadly stuff," affecting not just "old people" but also "plenty of young people." Yet, throughout February and into March, Trump continued to express optimism, noting on Feb. 26, for example, that "we have it so well under control."
"Just stay calm," Trump told Republican senators on March 10. "And it will all go away." The next day, the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and, on March 13, Trump declared a state of emergency.
But as the nation belatedly shut down to stem the growing pandemic, the president continued to express optimism.
"We're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel," he said in early April, when fewer than 10,000 Americans had died. He immediately sought to end the shutdown and reopen the economy, something the continuing prevalence of the disease has still not made totally possible, five months later.
Still, Trump continues his effort to cover up reality. "We are already making the turn," Trump said Sunday night in Nevada. "We're making that round, beautiful, last turn."
With more than 6 million Americans infected and the death toll still rising by several thousand each week, you don't have to be Dr. Anthony Fauci to recognize Trump's statements are misleading.
Just as Nixon's tape recordings proved his guilt in the Watergate cover-up, Trump's taped statements to Woodward provide the incontrovertible evidence he kept the truth of the COVID-19 peril from the American people.
