He knew all along.
At the outset of the pandemic, President Donald Trump routinely downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 in public, claiming the virus would disappear "like a miracle" and that Americans didn't need to bother with social distancing and face masks because it would all "work out fine."
But, in private, Trump admitted he knew better, a bombshell new book reveals.
The forthcoming book by Bob Woodward _ based in part on more than a dozen interviews with Trump _ quotes the president as confessing he was aware of the deadliness of the virus even before it hit the U.S. and that he misled the American people about it because he didn't want to cause "panic."
On Wednesday, Woodward released recordings of his interviews with Trump to CNN and The Washington Post corroborating the explosive accounts included in his book, "Rage," which is set to be released Sept. 15.
"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward in a recorded interview on Feb. 7, adding he had learned from his public health advisers that COVID-19 was about five times "more deadly" than the seasonal flu.
At the time of that interview, the first U.S. coronavirus death was still weeks away, and Trump kept saying publicly that Americans had nothing to worry about because COVID-19 wasn't worse than a bad flu season.
"We have it very much under control in this country," Trump told reporters on Feb. 23.
In another interview with Woodward on March 19, though, Trump admitted that his upbeat assessment was misleading.
"Really to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down," Trump told Woodward in the March interview, according to another recording released Wednesday. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."
Trump also told Woodward he understood young people could suffer severe symptoms from COVID-19.
"Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older. Young people, too, plenty of young people," Trump said in the March interview.
Trump has recently insisted that young people don't suffer from the virus, including saying last month that they are "almost immune."
It would take until June for Trump to publicly endorse a national mandate on face masks, social distancing and pandemic restrictions on businesses.
If Trump had called on states to shut down their economies and enforce social distancing restrictions earlier, thousands of American lives could have been saved, according to public health experts.
"Even a simple thing like voicing encouragement of face mask usage early on _ that could've saved hundreds of thousands of lives," said Dr. Dean Winslow, an infectious disease expert at Stanford University who was once under consideration by Trump to become a senior-ranking public health official at his Defense Department.
"There were a lot of really, really missed opportunities, and in my mind, the biggest one was not mustering the full force of the federal government," Winslow added. "We're still suffering from that."
More than 190,000 Americans have died from the virus so far _ the worst national death toll in the world by far. The U.S. also leads the world in the number of confirmed infections, and several states are experiencing resurgences of the virus.
Despite Woodward's audio recordings, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed Trump never lied to the American people about COVID-19.
"The president never downplayed the virus. He expressed calm," McEnany told reporters Wednesday afternoon. "The president was expressing calm, the president was hopeful."
Woodward _ whose work with Carl Bernstein helped uncover President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal _ writes in the book that Trump's own top advisers repeatedly warned him in early 2020 that COVID-19 could inflict a catastrophic toll on the U.S.
"This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency," Robert O'Brien, Trump's national security adviser, told the president on Jan. 28, according to Woodward. "This is going to be the roughest thing you face."
But Trump apparently didn't heed O'Brien's warnings and spent the following months publicly downplaying the severity of the virus.
"You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero," Trump said on Feb. 26 of the number of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. at the time.
Woodward writes that Trump's failure to act in February proved one of the worst missed opportunities of his presidency.
In the past few weeks, Trump has renewed his push for states to rapidly reopen their economies.
He has also held packed campaign rallies in violation of his own administration's COVID-19 guidelines while mocking people for wearing masks, including telling a reporter at the White House earlier this week that he didn't want to answer his question because he sounded "muffled."
Trump's flip-flopping on the virus comes even as health experts fear that the fall could bring another massive outbreak.
In his final interview with Woodward in July, Trump suggested he's not taking a more aggressive stance on the virus because he doesn't consider himself to be at fault.
"The virus has nothing to do with me," Trump said in the July 21 interview. "It's not my fault. China let the damn virus out."
