Excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book have revealed Donald Trump knew the coronavirus was deadly and highly infectious. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman convene to discuss this infuriating revelation, what it means for a President of the United States to murder his own people, and just how troubling it is that Woodward sat on this information as thousands of Americans died.
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Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates-Axton and I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We don't like to do these because if we do an emergency podcast it means things have gone to pot.
But we have to.
We have to talk about, unfortunately, the revelations that have come out today from Bob Woodward, who has known since February that Donald Trump has not only known how deadly the coronavirus was, But he has actively covered it up and downplayed the severity of it.
Tell me if I'm wrong, Nick, but doesn't that mean that the President of the United States has misled the American people and possibly led to, let me check my calculations here, hundreds of thousands of deaths?
It's called leadership, Jared.
Right into the shitter.
That's leadership right into the shitter.
It's called leadership because he doesn't want the rest of the country to panic.
So he must show a strong facade of information that will not panic anybody.
According to my notes and tell me, because what is time?
So apparently the way to calm a fearful nation through a pandemic is to tell them it'll go away like magic.
It's a hoax.
Or, I don't know, by the way, we've learned in recent months that he has a nightly phone call with Sean Hannity, where he basically tells him what to cover on the news and what guests to bring on, to then tell Sean Hannity, one of the leaders at Fox News, and probably talk to the people at Fox News, into treating it like the pandemic wasn't something to be afraid of, that they shouldn't wear masks, that it was just an overblown political tool by the left,
And so that's apparently what passes for leadership nowadays, huh?
Well, you know, especially when you compare the timelines, which is what Woodward's book is going to do, because we can now look back and see, what was he saying in February?
What was he saying in March?
Versus what was he saying in private?
You know, February, we've been saying this for a long time, was a lost month.
That was the time they could have had a chance to get this under control.
And so, you know, of course, I'm being cheeky because there's no other way to deal with this other than, you know, what we see in the movie Network, which is going to happen when we recover that this week, but all outrage.
But the point being that, you know, what happens to especially Trump followers, and we talked about this all the time, is how they so quickly solidify information that they agree with into their minds to the point where they can't change the mind.
No new information can affect that.
Well, this is what Trump did in February and March.
The flu is going to go away.
It doesn't hurt people who are young.
It'll be gone.
You know, we only have a few cases left.
All of those things solidified the information in his followers' minds.
And so when we see all these horrible pictures of people standing in a knee-deep or waist-deep lake, drinking beers with no masks over Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend, spreading the virus without a care in the world, it's directly because of what Trump He said on the record, and we can parse out exactly what he said, but he said on the record this doesn't just affect the elderly.
He said it affects young people.
It's five times as deadly as the flu.
He said, this is deadly stuff, is what he said.
And then for weeks and months at a time, he not only lied to the American people, He created an alternate reality where it wasn't real, it wasn't actually deadly, it wasn't problematic.
I want to be honest about this because this isn't about alarmism, this isn't about trying to churn up controversy.
This is, if not the most damning indictment of a sitting American president, we would have to have a conversation about what that would be.
Right.
I mean, it's literally it's it's it's if this was the same country, Donald Trump wouldn't be president.
But if this was the same country, this is pitchforks and torches stuff, man.
Like this is this is on a whole other level.
He he not only has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, he's destroyed our economy.
And I would I would be hesitant to to not bring this up.
He has created an environment where not only are people not taking safety and precautions, But they're also threatening one another.
They're murdering one another.
They're assaulting one another.
It has created moments, by the way, where paramilitary white supremacists and white terrorists have gone into legislatures and interrupted business and gained followers.
Not to mention, something like a QAnon during the pandemic has just grown and grown and grown until it's a force in American politics.
The repercussions of what he has done, it is really hard to overstate them because this is, this is supernova level treasonous murderous shit.
So what do we do with this?
Because, you know, with the way our government is built and the way the Constitution was written, you would say impeachment is in order.
And we've taken the task of Democrats for not doing the impeachment properly because it kind of felt like they sped the process up too much, even though people thought they took too long to even begin the whole thing.
But as a result, all the other information, because I think what you have to know is Nancy Pelosi is you have to assume that every week that goes by, more and more damning information is simply going to come out by a matter of fact, the way he operates, his undisciplined nature, the way he speaks.
And so here, but this is a couple of twofold thing, because if the impeachment process had gone on a little bit longer into that beyond February, and then we would have been able to see what the COVID response was, then you have a situation of, okay, now that Woodward, who is doing these interviews, it started in December of 2019, who has who is doing these interviews, it started in December of 2019, who has a lot of this really problematic information directly related to
Then there's pressure on him that he needs to release this information and not save it for a fucking book that he can make some money on just before the election happens.
And that's where we are with all these people.
All these people have enough information that combined when they knew about it and they could have come out with it when it happened.
Would have led to an impeachment.
We wouldn't be here now and maybe would have led to impeachment before we even got to the coronavirus.
And that's even more of a betrayal because again it's this whole notion of it's about money.
It's really it's about money.
And that's how that's how sad this is.
They put money in front of the country and put money in front of people's lives.
Yeah.
You're exactly right.
We're going to talk about Network on a bonus episode for Patreon subscribers.
And I have to say that that discussion just became more important to talk about news and how it's treated.
I want to say a couple things before I say what I really need to say.
Bob Woodward performed an amazing service to the American people by exposing the corruption within the Nixon administration.
Because of that, he has risen to the point of being the patron saint of American investigative journalism.
Right?
I mean, like, listen, that's the first sentence of his obituary is that, you know, he helped uncover the Watergate conspiracy.
Right.
For that, we owe him so much.
On top of that, he's done incredible work in being able to go into American Presidencies and administrations and finding out what's happening.
But I want to point something out.
The fact that he's been able to do that speaks to a major shift.
The access that he has had to presidents, the fact that Donald Trump felt comfortable enough to say this stuff to him, and George W. Bush and the people around him were comfortable enough to talk about the disaster that was Iraq, it has to do with the fact that people like Bob Woodward have been swallowed into the muck and the mire and the poison Of what they tried to expose in the first place.
What you just said is exactly right.
I publish books.
And I have to tell you something.
Bob Woodward has sat on this for months.
For months.
He had to wake up in the morning and eat his grapefruit and drink his coffee.
And every day that he did it, he had to look at the number of people who died.
The number of people who were getting sick.
The communities that were being swallowed whole by coronavirus.
And he had to look at Donald Trump making these false, misleading statements.
And do you know what he did?
He decided that he was going to wait until September to drive up orders of his books.
I say this with a somber heart.
Fuck Bob Woodward.
This is a villainous moment and it speaks to an infection in American media that it is really hard to nail down and really hard to call by its name because it is disgusting.
It is damning.
What do the journalism, you know, standards say about this kind of a thing?
Aren't there like, isn't there some sort of Bible you have to follow about this stuff?
Well, I mean, when you're Bob Woodward, you basically authored the Bible, right?
But I will say, like, just take a second with Bob Woodward.
If this had been released, would it have hurt his sales that much?
Do you think?
Like, if a Bob Woodward book comes out, is it not a bestseller?
Right.
Exactly.
It's a bestseller.
Right.
So instead of selling a million books, he'll sell like 850,000.
850,000!
And by the way, I have to tell you, and again I'm a journalist and I'm a writer and so it gives me a new joy to say this, don't buy this book.
Don't buy it.
Do not help this person.
This is a disgusting, damning thing that he has done.
Do not buy this book.
But it will still be a bestseller.
Not just because of this, but because he's Bob Woodward.
It is a negligible thing.
He's a wealthy, rich man.
And to look at something like this, what he just dropped, and to let hundreds of thousands of people die.
And by the way, not just that, but the people who haven't died, they had to go through fear, trauma, many of them are permanently maimed by this disease.
To sit on that and to make decisions based on book sales is insanity.
Insanity Nick and it I can tell you're hot about it, too I am I am like molten level hot about this like this is just it's it's really head-shakingly disturbing You know, part of me, I suppose, even though we kind of knew or suspected that that's what Trump knew, because we can't lose focus here.
You know what I mean?
We could shoot on what would all be like.
But again, the point is, is that we have a president that's basically committed genocide against 200,000 people and more.
It'll be the way what they're going to ultimately intend to do could get to half a million or a million people dead for this.
To be able to do this side by side and you know again like I mentioned earlier where we see what he said versus what he was doing in public is so frustrating and just disgusting.
You know, he was the one who so bungled the announcement of stopping people from coming in from Europe, not China, it was Europe, that it caused a bottleneck for 10 hours and it was probably the biggest super spreader event we've had, next to all of a sudden the Sturgis motorcycle rally next to all of a sudden the Sturgis motorcycle rally they had.
Apparently that might end up taking the cake.
And rallies, Nick, rallies.
All these rallies that Trump has held.
Think about that.
And by the way, we can start with Herman Cain, right?
Yeah.
But think about all of the people he knowingly brought into a room.
The people who support him.
The people who vote for him and live for him and build their entire identities around him.
He brought them in a place where they were put in danger.
Here's what I've been saying.
You know, when you watch a lot of Fox News, it really feels like they don't understand or refuse to believe that asymptomatic transmission can happen.
But when you hear what Trump has said about how he completely understood how this disease transmits and how deadly it could be, I don't know what to make of that.
Does that suddenly make it seem like the cynical take would be that they all knew it as well.
They're not just following the lead.
They know it.
They understand it.
And they're simply saying, we don't give a shit if anyone dies because we somehow need to have some more stores open so people can go shopping in the Main Street.
Well, and by the way, you just put your finger on it.
When he says panic, he doesn't mean people being afraid.
He means people not going to work.
He means businesses not getting people.
It's like a stock panic.
It's a business panic.
He didn't want people to panic and hurt the economy and possibly... I mean...
Like you just said, I have to tell you that we knew deep down that he had done this, right?
That's the thing.
This is the smoking gun, and it couldn't smoke anymore.
I mean, listen, there's a lot of fire where this smoke is, right?
To hear him so lucidly and explicitly lay out not just how deadly this thing is, but how it transmits It actually kind of makes it a lot worse.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, the fact that he could wrap his head around it and he made a decision, this is something that I can't let be treated as serious because it will hurt me.
And we can talk a lot about the fact that his brain sucks, right?
I mean, his brain is pretty much gone.
I don't know.
Maybe there was a wrinkle left to absorb knowledge.
Because in these tapes he gives an expert like opinion on how this thing spreads and what it is.
The fact that he knows that actually somehow or another makes this like twice as worse.
Right?
It actually makes it somehow or another more evil what's been done.
Right.
And the answer to what we were wondering is like what do you do with this?
Impeachment.
I guess, is it too late?
I would almost say to Pelosi, impeach him again.
Start the whole process.
Make that one go fast.
Who cares if they don't even get close to finishing it by the election.
This is the kind of thing that impeachment was reserved for.
Not necessarily what they did with a call to Ukraine.
I mean, think about that.
What do you think is worse?
A call to Ukraine trying to get help.
By the way, this is how bad Trump is.
And how you walk in shit long enough and you smell like it.
This is what he's gotten us to.
I am now willing to overlook a phone call that he was trying to break the law to Ukraine because obviously something so much worse has now happened that he needs to be taken out.
Now, here's the other ticking clock.
Every day that goes by, more and more people are going to die.
That is really the big thing here.
Now, why?
I hope to see Biden's response.
And Biden needs to start acting just like he's already in the White House.
He needs to act like he's in the presidency.
He needs to be visiting the CDC.
He's got to be visiting, you know, with Fauci.
If they start to do these things, I think that will go a long way to helping him win this thing.
Well, first and foremost, I want to point out, again, in a sane country, and we should be hoping for a sane country.
Am I wrong?
Like, that's what we should be hoping for.
Sanity!
A functional sane country is technically what we should be aspiring to, so let's just lay that out.
When Richard Nixon's case was done, and there were so many smoking guns that you couldn't ignore them anymore, Republican leadership went to the White House and said, you have to resign.
For the good of the country, for the good of the party, for the good of the American people, you need to resign.
Uh, the fact that there have not been sightings of Republicans at the White House right now demanding that he resign, not just for this, but also for all this bullshit with the troops and all of that, whatever.
He should be gone.
Period.
They should be asking him to resign.
He won't resign, whatever.
They should be telling him he should.
Number two.
And I want to say this, and I want to be very, very careful with how I say it, because I think it's important.
The Democratic Party has a problem with Donald Trump.
And they have a party with Donald Trump because on one hand, he is an incredible fundraiser.
And it's so easy to play politics with him.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's easy to say, look what he did, donate to us, we need to hold him accountable.
Number two, they are so afraid to call him what he is.
Joe Biden and every Democrat and quite frankly every Republican in the country needs to get in front of a camera and they need to say, listen, we're not playing politics.
We're not going to give a rousing speech.
We're not here to get on CNN at five and six and seven and, you know, just continue on like an election thing.
This man has murdered Americans.
This man has destroyed America.
And listen, you cannot deny that's his voice.
You cannot deny Woodward has... he has capital on both sides of the aisle.
I mean, he deals with Republicans and Democrats.
They need to say, we're not playing politics with this.
We're not going to screw around with this.
You need to know that the President of the United States has not only betrayed you, he has damned you to murder and suffering.
And we can't play around with it anymore.
Like, we have to put aside all of the posturing and all the rhetoric, and we need to get down to brass tacks on this.
I agree.
And I think that it would make a great talking point in a debate, if Joe Biden would actually do that.
And we'll have to see if they have... Debates are happening, right?
Well, today there was a story that Trump has absolutely rejected any debate prep, which continues to make me think that we're eventually going to get the debates canceled, but we're supposed to have a debate in a few weeks.
Yeah, so I mean that certainly isn't an area to do it.
You know what's going to happen is they're going to ask Republican senators today about their response.
And you know they're all going to say, I haven't seen it yet, I don't know what it is, I can't comment.
Can we do a quick skit?
Sure.
I'm going to be a Republican senator and you be a journalist asking me about this.
OK, I'm going to walk by.
OK, Senator Cruz.
I'm late for a vote.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I'm late for a vote, everyone.
That's it.
That's all they got.
That's all these people have.
They're always late for a vote, Nick.
They've got to get to a vote.
They've got to get to a car.
They've got to do whatever.
They haven't read the tweet.
Right that's exactly right or they haven't seen it and they won't they don't have time to look at it and figure out what that he's killing Americans yeah that's the playbook has gotten so tired with all these things that at some point that's why we just give up you know it's like there's nothing new there's no other other way to deal with this thing and they just follow the same thing they've been doing and it's so it's you know what it is it's so transparently ridiculous that I don't even know where to begin or to end this thought.
It's just ridiculous.
We have to stay angry.
Because what you just said is exactly right.
And we've sort of tiptoed around it this whole time.
The damnedest thing about this, and these are moments of clarity, you know what I mean?
You get stuck in life sometimes and you sort of forget to live.
You're driving a car for hours and you forget you're driving a car and all of a sudden you're like, holy shit, I'm driving a car.
This man, this monster, the effect that he has on culture is it just accumulates and accumulates.
And we're sitting here and we're like, oh of course he lied about the coronavirus and killed hundreds of thousands and ruined the economy and damned everybody else to permanent damage.
That's unacceptable.
We can't live like that.
And because what ends up happening is you end up in an authoritarian, managed, democratic state where you just look around and you're like, well, what are you going to do?
Yeah, of course they're killing us and they're stealing from us.
And of course they're monsters and criminals, but you know, what are we going to do?
And we just, we can't, we have to stay pissed off.
We have to be angry about this.
I agree.
It's so funny because again, if you're not a Patreon, you have to really consider it because we're doing Network tomorrow or Thursday or Friday and it so speaks to this and the anger that people felt after Watergate and after Vietnam in the middle of a terrible economy in the middle of the 70s and we're sort of in that same I guess we're missing an unpopular war, basically.
But other than that, we've got Watergate times 10.
We've got an economy that's now... The worst part about that part is to have to hear this guy lie about the economy every day, as if it's really doing well when we have the highest unemployment we've had since the Depression.
We're not angry.
We're not angry anymore.
And I don't know where that anger is gone.
I suppose some of the anger is in Portland and scattered across the country a little bit.
But that's why it probably doesn't feel good right now as far as what might happen in the election because the anger isn't palpable.
It's the split reality between what we know in our guts and what we're presented to.
Like, right now, if you turn on one of the mainstream news outlets, they're probably treating this like it's a mistaken strategy, right?
It's like chutes and ladders, like, you made your way up the board, but oh no, you found a chute, now you gotta go back, and how's this gonna hurt his campaign?
What's it gonna do for November?
Screw that.
The American president admitted that he was going to murder Americans and they murdered Americans.
Like, legitimately that's what he did.
We know in our guts that this is evil and wrong.
We have to accept that.
We cannot continue to be gaslit and led astray and lied to and just shrug our shoulders and say whatever.
We have to stop accepting this and we have to understand that this is monstrous.
I'm a little bit surprised that Wilbur's book wouldn't have had any kind of a quote or maybe it does but no one's seen it yet or something but that refers to letting the white virus wash over the country because he's actually maybe don't even need that because he said it you know in a press conference.
Do you know what's sad?
Do you know what's sad about this?
What?
I'll make a prediction right now.
We'll get this published today and it'll get out on I believe it's Wednesday but what is time?
There will probably be something comes out tomorrow.
From Woodward's book.
Because this is a corporate rollout of a book.
That's what they're doing.
It's like trailers.
It's like, I don't know about you, but I was really excited to see the Dune trailer today, right?
It was like, yesterday, it was like the teaser of the trailer.
Today is the trailer.
I'm sure in a week they'll have a second trailer and then there will be a final trailer.
It's a rollout process so there's probably more damning stuff that we're going to find out and that's the sad truth of it because this is a strategy.
Yeah, you know it's funny because Bolton was probably so kept out of the loop on all these things that he's probably like sitting in his book going, and he probably sold a ton of books, but like his book did not have any kind of big revelatory details.
And you know it's because Trump hated him so much he wouldn't even have in the room enough to hear all this shit.
Meanwhile, Woodward, at least as a professional, knows how to interview.
Although, I'm not sure you have to be a professional interviewer to get that kind of stuff out of Trump.
I think you just sort of shut up and let him talk, and it just kind of keeps running out of his mouth that way.
I mean, listen, listen, yeah, I'll put it this way.
My daughter's birthday is today, and I somehow said, well, half of your birthday gift is here, the other half is coming, and then all of a sudden I'm like, shit, why did I say that?
She's now going to start looking through the house.
All I had to do is not say anything, right?
And I'm saying it.
So it's like, that's how easy it is for a guy like Trump to just sort of let loose national secrets.
Well, first of all, happy birthday to her.
Second of all, I have said this, I don't think I've said it on the podcast before, but the best interviewer of Donald J. Trump is Howard Stern.
Because Howard Stern was always a person who would have him in studio and it was like, he would just let Trump go.
He would just give him a topic and then just keep letting Trump go.
And eventually, I mean, he's not, he's not a competent You know, hidden person.
Like, he's told us about his crimes.
He's told us what he's done.
And that's the thing.
It's like, you're exactly right.
Like, I'm sure he was in a room with Woodward, and he knows who Woodward is, and he wanted to seem like he was smart about politics.
So he gave Woodward the, you know, quote-unquote, inside baseball.
Yeah, this thing's really, really deadly, but here's how I'm gonna handle it.
Here's my strategy.
It just so happens that this person is so corroded and awful that his strategy was to lie to people and create a situation where hundreds of thousands of people would die and more would suffer.
That's the problem.
And you know what's even worse is that he now has a Department of Justice.
He'll say things and he'll admit things and nothing's going to happen.
They're now going to take over this civil case against him that he did something that happened way before his presidency and because he lied about it while he was president is giving them some sort of weird precedent to take over the case so that and you know why the only reason why that he wants them to do it so you don't have to pay any money
To his real lawyers to defend him which we would have been a lot of very expensive I'm sure but like this is but now we get to pay for it and It's and by the way Do you have any doubt if they were ever to get his DNA that it would not match the DNA that she has on him?
I, listen, I will tell you this.
I think he has been caught dead to rights.
And I think what you just brought up, which by the way, just to give you a quick preview, I think this is a topic that we're going to talk about on tomorrow's podcast.
Because this, this is, this is one of the final levels of the perversion of a government, right?
Is it not only becomes the playground of an authoritarian It becomes the tool of the authoritarian right for oppression but also in defense and also towards like their goals and and it you know it ends up becoming a thing where it's like it literally becomes an extension of themselves.
It becomes like you know almost like a USB drive for them to tap in whenever they need but that's who this person is.
He is rotten to his core.
He is a pitiable I can't put it any better.
And what we're seeing now is just further confirmation of who he is.
I can't put it any better.
And I can't wait for tomorrow's podcast either.
Well, we're sorry we had to do this emergency podcast.
My God, I wish that he wasn't so disgusting.
I wish that we wouldn't find this out.
I wish that this was... And by the way, he should resign now.
Right.
He should resign now.
Except for, you know, he then automatically just... I'm gonna crumple this thing up out of anger.
He responded to all this, not just by lying about it, but by then holding an emergency press conference announcing his future Supreme Court picks, which I don't know if Nick has had it... Did you get a chance to see that?
Wait, he didn't announce it, did he?
I saw he did not announce it yesterday.
Did he do it today?
Oh, he did.
Oh, wow.
Can I, for the audience's enjoyment, just give you two of the names on that list?
I mean, are we going to recognize them?
Ted Cruz.
Shut up.
And Tom Cotton.
That's what Tom Cotton's been ailing for this whole time?
No, he's not going to be a Supreme Court justice.
He's going to be like the dictator-in-chief.
But the whole point is that Trump should have resigned today and instead he held an emergency press conference.
So anyway, we have to combat this thing.
We have to know what we're dealing with.
It's so disgusting.
And we have to understand who he is and we have to not lose our ability to be pissed off and angry about this and stunned by it because it is stunning.
In the meantime, we're going to come back and record a podcast for Friday.
Tomorrow we're going to talk more about what we've gotten into today.
That'll be out Friday.
We're also going to do a bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers going over the movie Network from 1976.
I really want people to hear this.
Because I think it's a really important discussion that is even more important today to talk about what happened to our media, and why our media sucks, and why journalism sucks now, and why we've gotten to the point where greed has ruined this country as badly as it has.
So we're going to tape that.
That'll be available after the next podcast.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm so sorry that we have this person as President of the United States of America, but I'm happy that you're here.
If you need us, until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?