Tucker Carlson said that President Donald Trump’s closest aides had failed him with their efforts to persuade him that the coronavirus “was not that big a deal,” Newsweek said in a report.
The Tucker Carlson Tonight host was ahead of his Fox colleagues in raising the alarm about COVID-19, which White House sources told The Washington Post was a factor leading to Trump changing the tone of his public pronouncements that had been playing it down.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Carlson said that he visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for the first time a week and a half ago to speak frankly to the President about the danger that the coronavirus posed.
Although he would not divulge Trump’s reaction on the record, Carlson suggested that the President’s initial dismissal of the virus was in part due to Republican figures who believed part of the panic was fabricated by liberal-leaning media.
“I think Trump has a really finely calibrated sense of danger and I think it served him well. I think a lot of the people around him, and I mean broadly around him — particularly Republican members on Capitol Hill, in leadership too — were determined to pretend this wasn’t happening,” said Carlson. “There are a number of members of the Senate who really ought to know better, who, by the way, are at risk of being really hurt by this personally who were determined to convince him that this was not that big a deal.”
Carlson said he was alerted to the danger of the new coronavirus after speaking to a non-partisan figure in the U.S. government with access to intelligence, who claimed that the Chinese authorities were not being transparent about the outbreak, which “really got my attention.”
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