Trump lashes out at Bob Woodward at Michigan rally and invokes British WWII slogan: ‘Keep calm and carry on’

‘They wanted me to come out and scream, “people are dying!” No, we did it just the right way’

Donald Trump called journalist Bob Woodward – whose latest book Rage is the result of a series of wide-ranging interviews with the president – a “wack job” following  the release of audio excerpts in which the president admits to concealing the deadly threat of the coronavirus more than a month before the crisis was declared a pandemic.

At a campaign rally in Michigan, the president invoked the British World War II slogan “keep calm and carry on” as he defended his effort to “downplay” Covid-19’s threat to the US. The posters carrying the slogan were never actually released.

“As the British government advised the British people in the face of World War II, keep calm and carry on,” he said. "That's what I did."

The slogan, which has seen a revival in pop culture and memes within the past decade, was rarely used after designs emerged from government offices in the late 1930s, becoming instead an ironic lost message from a period of chronic unease.

On 7 February, the president told Woodward that the coronavirus is “deadly stuff” and far deadlier than the flu – contradicting public messaging that the virus would “disappear” and amplifying false comparisons between flu infections and Covid-19.

The following month, he told Woodward that he “wanted to always play it down” to prevent “panic” as his administration faced intense scrutiny for failing to adequately respond to the looming public health crisis throughout the entire month of February.

“They wanted me to come out and scream, ‘people are dying’. No, we did it just the right way,” the president told his supporters in Freeland, Michigan. “We have to be calm. We don’t want to be crazed lunatics. We have to lead."

The president compared himself to Winston Churchill and falsely claimed that he “would oftentimes go to a roof in London and speak” to the country during the Blitz bombings, which began 80 years ago this month. While Churchill would sometimes watch the raids from the roof of the Treasury – to the alarm of this bodyguard – he did not broadcast to the nation from there.

“And he always spoke with calmness,” the president said. "He said, 'We have to show calmness.'"