Trump’s Attacks On Bob Woodward Contradicted By One Of His Own Tweets

President Donald Trump and his allies on Wednesday lashed out at journalist Bob Woodward over revelations in his upcoming book. But those attacks are falling flat in light of an old comment from Trump himself about the famed author.

Woodward’s upcoming book, Rage, reveals that the president lied to the American public about the coronavirus pandemic and knowingly downplayed the infection’s severity and how it’s spread. He told Woodward on Feb. 7 that the virus was deadly, spread via the air and worse than the flu, but over the following weeks, he told the public it was under control, that cases would soon be down to close to zero and even suggested the flu was far worse.

On Wednesday, Trump attacked the book as “just another political hit job” and “boring,” and said Woodward was “rapidly fading.” In 2013, however, Trump had a very different opinion of Woodward’s work:

It’s not clear what prompted that specific tweet; it was posted just days after Woodward said Gene Sperling, director of the White House Economic Council under then-President Barack Obama told him he’d regret criticizing the budget cuts under the sequester. Trump also praised some of the other reporting Woodward did on the Obama administration.

Since becoming president, Trump has run hot and cold on Woodward, usually in relation to whatever the author has said or written at any given moment. Trump dismissed Woodward’s 2018 book, Fear: Trump In The White House, as a “joke” and a “scam” and called the author a liar in a barrage of tweets.

Last year, Trump praised Woodward as “cool, calm and interesting” for his comments in a “Face the Nation” appearance, and in 2017, he thanked Woodward for dismissing the unverified Steele dossier as a “garbage document.”

Rage goes on sale next week and many are unhappy with Woodward for waiting until the book’s release to reveal the president’s lies about the virus.