Democracy Dies in Darkness

Trump now says he knew the virus ‘could be horrible’ when he was saying things like ‘it’s going to disappear’

He didn’t want to tell Americans sooner because he didn’t want to be ‘negative,’ he says

Analysis by
Staff writer
April 1, 2020 at 11:28 a.m. EDT
The White House coronavirus task force on March 31 presented a grim picture of where the U.S. could be headed over the next couple of months. (Video: The Washington Post)

On Tuesday, a somber President Trump acknowledged that under the best-case scenario, 100,000 to 200,000 Americans could die of coronavirus. “It’s not the flu,” he said, in stark contrast to when he compared it repeatedly with the flu in March.

Now that the president seems to have come around to the gravity of the health crisis, what does he think about his weeks of downplaying a virus he now says is serious? What about not advising social distancing weeks earlier, even though there is widespread agreement among public health experts that Americans should have been isolating sooner than mid-March?