Most readers of this review will already know the big news item issuing from “Rage,” Bob Woodward’s second account of the Trump White House. On Feb. 7 of this year the president told Mr. Woodward in an interview that the novel coronavirus is “deadly stuff”—“more deadly than even your strenuous flus”—but continued to de-emphasize the virus’s lethality, comparing it to “the regular flu that we have flu shots for” and so on. The president even tells Mr. Woodward—or “admits” to him, to use headline language—that he deliberately downplayed the virus. “I wanted to always play it down,” he told the author on March 19. “I still...

Source: Wall Street Journal September 15, 2020 03:56 UTC