Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward busted President Donald Trump’s COVID scandal wide open on Wednesday by releasing an audio recording of Trump clearly admitting that the virus is much deadlier than the seasonal flu and that he purposely downplayed it as Americans continued to die.

From the beginning, Trump has referred to the pandemic as a “hoax” and has compared it to the flu. Nearly 200,000 Americans have died since February as schools and universities begin to open back up amid an explosion of COVID cases across the country, especially in red states.

But as we knew all along, Trump and his allies have been lying to us about the severity of the COVID pandemic. Because during a recorded conversation with Woodward, a seasoned investigative journalist, Trump not only admitted that it’s worse than the flu, he admitted that it’s deadly to both young and old.

“It goes through the air…But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people. It’s turning out its not just old people, Bob.”

And yet, Trump has been demanding that kids return to school even though he knows how dangerous the coronavirus potentially is to them.

Trump then admitted that he always intended to downplay the pandemic.

“I wanted to always play it down,” he said.

Here’s the audio via Twitter:

That is clearly Trump’s voice on tape. So there’s no claiming that this is somehow “fake news” by Trump and his supporters. He has known all along how deadly this virus is and that it can kill young people, too. Yet he continued downplaying it and pretending that it’s no worse than the flu. Again, nearly 200,000 Americans have died and more than 6 million are infected with more cases and deaths to come.

This is totally unacceptable and inexcusable and Trump should immediately resign in disgrace and be prosecuted for negligence and the deaths of every American that could have been prevented had he told the truth and taken the virus seriously from the beginning.

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