Fox contributor defends Trump misleading the public: COVID-19 “a much less serious threat than we thought”
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From the September 9, 2020, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier
BRET BAIER (HOST): You know, I asked, Mollie, the National Security Advisor why the President would sit down with Bob Woodward, knowing that this book was going to come out fifty-some days ahead of the election. He said it's just part of what the President wants to do, talking straight.
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY (GUEST): You know, I just read Byron York's excellent book, Obsession, which just came out yesterday, and one of the big themes in that is looking at how President Trump thinks that if he talks to people he can win them over and it is this a pattern where he keeps talking to people who seek his destruction, but this is something that we've already known. And in general, I think people should be ready for this type of supposed bombshell to drop every couple of days, because we're in the closing days of an election -- or the last couple months of an election and people are very interested in fighting President Trump. But I'm not sure this is such a big deal. We already knew that President Trump thought this was serious, he closed the border, he created a task force, he declared a public health emergency. And we already knew in March he was asked, "Why are you so optimistic about it?" or "Why are you downplaying it?" He says, "I don't want to cause panic." I think that, in fact, if there were criticism to be had against President Trump, it's that he didn't do enough to stop those people who try to panic everything and to shut down and, you know, everyone said it was going to be two weeks that we needed to have a lock down and we're now in many months of it and I think we know now it's a much less serious threat than we thought at the time, but there's still criticism to be had about whether Trump and other politicians did enough to stop that panic that the media were inducing.