And though he did not say he lied in that Washington Post audio, he admitted playing down what he knew. INSKEEP: In late March, after the country shut down, the president spoke to Bob Woodward again. TRUMP: It's also more deadly than your - you know, your - even your strenuous flus. Again, this was the recorded interview where he had previously told the truth. When you give the lie to someone, you prove them wrong, and it is on the matter of comparing coronavirus to the flu that the president most clearly gives the lie to himself. INSKEEP: Now, there's an old phrase - giving the lie to someone. So you have 8,000 versus 26 deaths at this time. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of cases - we have 8,000 deaths. And if you look at the flu, the flu for this year, we're at eight - we're looking at 8,000 deaths. At this point, the president had known for more than a month that the coronavirus was far worse than the flu, yet he said this.

By March 10, pro sports, universities and schools were about to shut down. INSKEEP: Instead, in early March, cases spread across the nation. INSKEEP: The next day, February 27, the president dismissed the threat again. TRUMP: And, again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. And on February 26, at a public news briefing, the president waved off the threat. That was early February, after he'd been briefed on the most serious threat of his presidency, but the public was not fully focused on what was coming.

INSKEEP: The president repeats, it's many times more deadly than the flu. It's also more deadly than your - you know, your - even your strenuous flus. You know, the touch - you don't have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It goes through air, Bob.

On February 7, the president told Woodward what he'd heard from China's president about the virus. It is best to listen to his statements in the order they happened.

In them, the president said how serious the pandemic was, although he later told the public something else. He interviewed the president for a new book called 'Rage.' With the president's permission, he recorded the interviews now published by The Washington Post. The journalist Bob Woodward documented this. He made misleading claims about the pandemic, a life-or-death matter affecting almost every American. Recordings show he said one thing on TV and another off camera. This time, in effect, the whistleblower is the president himself. Several times during the Trump administration, a whistleblower has accused the president of wrongdoing.

Woodward rage