WASHINGTON — To the ancient Greeks, hubris was the crime of arrogance — an offense against common decency and an insult to the gods.
Their myths included a goddess named Nemesis whose job was to punish the prideful. She lured Narcissus, vainest of men, to a pool where he fell in love with his reflection and drowned.
No character in myth ever tempted Nemesis as ardently as President Donald Trump courted Bob Woodward, journalism’s longtime humbler of presidents.
In 18 conversations spanning more than nine hours since December, Trump welcomed Woodward into the White House and called him on the telephone, often late at night.
And what did the president reap for his attentions? The most comprehensive and damning catalog yet of his failings in office, arriving in bookstores only seven weeks before election day.
Nemesis would be amused.
The big revelation in Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” is that when Trump told Americans the COVID-19 pandemic was no worse than a bad flu season, he knew the disease was much worse. He told Woodward it was “deadly,” “a horrible thing.”
“I wanted always to play it down,” he told the reporter.
That shouldn’t have come as news to anyone who was listening to the president with a sliver of healthy skepticism.
In the pandemic’s early weeks, there was genuine debate among experts on how infectious the coronavirus was. But by mid-March, even Trump agreed to shut down much of the nation’s economy to stop the virus’ spread.
Then, for months, he waffled publicly between treating the pandemic as an emergency and claiming it would soon disappear. “Stay calm,” he pleaded whenever the stock market fell, a problem that seemed to worry him more than mounting deaths.
The president became a slave to his own wishful thinking, promoting spurious cures and never doing the hard work of organizing a national effort to provide medical supplies, tests or contact tracing.
“He wants to be a wartime president,” his golfing buddy and advisor Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Woodward, “but he doesn’t want to own any more than he has to.”
But again, all that happened in plain view. The real impact of Woodward’s reporting probably comes from the audiotapes of his interviews.
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump said, his voice booming clearly over the telephone Feb. 7, “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
