In the weeks following Donald Trump’s private admission to Bob Woodward that the coronavirus was, in fact, “deadly,” a February 7 comment revealed in the veteran journalist’s new book, the president publicly wrote off the then impending mass-death disaster as a garden-variety “flu” and a “hoax” fueled by Democrats and the media. At the time, many of the top-rated Fox News hosts stuck to similar messaging, regurgitating the president’s lies nearly word-for-word, down to Sean Hannity calling mainstream outlets’ coverage of the virus, which is now responsible for more than 191,000 American deaths, another attempt to “bludgeon Trump.”
As the virus’s deadly nature became more obvious, Fox’s coverage evened out. But Woodward’s Wednesday reveal saw the network return to all-out Trump-defense mode. Predictably, the president gave his first TV interview post–Woodward bombshell to Hannity, one of his closest advisers—a role he’s taken on in an informal capacity, despite his reported resultant stress-induced vaping habit. The host did use his time to criticize the president, though not for lying to Americans while leaving the country in the dark amid a global health crisis. “I don’t think a lot of good comes from talking to Bob Woodward, my own personal opinion,” Hannity said before repeatedly praising Trump’s early “actions” to respond to COVID-19 and his decision to not publicly disclose its high risks in order to prevent a “panic.” (In a March 19 interview with Woodward, as Americans were coming to terms with their new reality, Trump said, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”) The president agreed with Hannity’s assessment and implied that Woodward’s reporting is a “hit [job]” that he “almost definitely won’t read.”
On the Thursday edition of Fox & Friends, cohost Steve Doocy used the same line of defense to stick up for the show’s most valuable viewer, saying that the president is regularly warned of potential threats in closed-door briefings and “he doesn’t, you know, blurt out, ‘Somebody is trying to blow up Akron’ or something like that. Instead, as he said, he didn’t want people to freak out, so he tried to keep people calm.”
Fox’s position has given cover to Republican lawmakers as they formulate their own responses to Woodward’s reporting. While Woodward’s connection to the Watergate scandal has led some to compare Richard Nixon’s career-ending tapes and Trump’s recorded comments, the sitting Republican president has something the former never did: a permanent media shield. If today’s GOP lawmakers were to draw the line at the Woodward tapes, they would be vulnerable to a flurry of negative coverage that could potentially damage their standing in the party. As longtime Atlantic journalist James Fallows noted, Republican lawmakers opting to either stay on the sideline for Trump’s latest scandal or play defense is vastly different to how members of Nixon’s GOP reacted. “When Nixon tapes came out, the GOP viziers of the era went to the White House and told Nixon he had to leave. (For objectively less destructive acts.)” Fallows tweeted. “When today’s Trump tapes have come out, the GOP ‘leaders’ have…disappeared.”
Case in point: Rather than attempting to explain away Trump’s lies, Senator John Kennedy shrugged off the whole scandal, specifically because he’s not a big fan of the medium Woodward used to relay the president’s comments. “These gotcha books don’t really interest me that much,” the Louisiana Republican told CNN’s Pamela Brown when pressed about the matter, a line he repeated three times even as he was being informed that the interviews are on tape. Senator Mitt Romney, despite being Trump’s no. 1 Republican critic in the Senate, responded to the Woodward news with an understated: “It doesn’t sound ideal to me.”