knew what i just showed you earlier, was pressing on with the promises of a reopening. so i would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by easter. this country was meant to be open and vibrant and great, not where people are staying in. we ve solved every problem, we ve solved it quickly. the cdc is advising the use of nonmedical cloth face covering. this is voluntary. i don t think i m going to be doing it. he doesn t think he s going to do it. that would change, too, which we ll get to. again, what we learned, knowing what we know now, that s how he sounded. you head into may 2020. the u.s. hit 100,000 deaths. the kind of number that shocked people, but it was a fraction of what would come to be a death toll of 1 million americans. trump s covid press conferences offered a stream of
emergency would deter trump s focus on re-election. to be fair with history, he s not the first president to face a crisis while caring about re-election. but the tapes also suggest something that might come across as a deeper problem. a kind of constant linking of the cost of the virus and his lost political advantages. trump voicing to woodward his blunt view that covid is what tripped up his campaign and almost casually talking about the impact and the cost of this pandemic more in a metric of trump rallies lost rather than lives lost. if we didn t have the virus, i was 10, 12 points up. i was cruising to election. yeah, well people are worried about the virus. i know that, bob. but the virus has nothing to do with me. with covid, you really can t do rallies, probably airport rallies, but you can t do the stadium rallies. you can t do the indoor arena rallies. you are running against the