Woodward Book: Trump Lied About Chinese Travel Ban

Business Insider reports:

At least five of President Donald Trump’s top advisers urged him to limit travel from China in late January, despite the president’s repeated claims that he made the decision alone, journalist Bob Woodward reports in a new book.

Woodward writes in his White House exposé “Rage” that health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, advised Trump to institute the travel restriction in a January 31 meeting.

But Trump has said both in public interviews and in a conversation with Woodward that he was the only person in that meeting to support the travel restriction and that his aides actively opposed the move.

Axios reports:

Trump has frequently cited the restrictions as his go-to defense of the administration’s coronavirus response, claiming that it saved “potentially millions of lives.”

But the assertion that the policy was singularly his idea — and that “almost everybody,” including public health experts, was opposed to it — is “very different” from what actually happened, Woodward said.

Woodward reports in his forthcoming book “Rage,” that the policy was recommended to Trump at a January meeting by some of the top health experts in the administration, including Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Robert Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.