"Bob Woodward’s second book on Donald Trump commanded attention when it was released in September 2020. Based upon seventeen conversations the president freely undertook with America’s most famous investigative journalist,[3] as well as discussions with administration officials and Republicans in Congress. Rage turned the COVID-19 story upside down when it reported Trump’s recorded declaration on March 19, 2020 that he had known from the start that a pandemic was going to savage America, but he publicly denied it for months, he said, to prevent panic. Many people apparently believed Trump because the explanation was so utterly damning to him it seemed he never would have made it up to protect himself. After all, he was confessing to being someone in a rooming house who discovered the building was on fire, and then told no one because he did not want the victims to panic. So the sheer idiocy of the rationalization, oddly enough, gave it verisimilitude. But one can find a straighter explanation of the president’s behavior that fits him to a T. The “prevent panic” excuse was actually less damaging to Trump than the truth, which was that he had ignored a whole bucket of warnings for weeks about what was going to happen. He not only kept denying the “building” was on fire, he just let it burn away. And when the fire department came to the door, he sent it away."