Former Bush White House medical advisor Dr. Jonathan Reiner called on President Donald Trump to resign on Wednesday after the bombshell revelations from Bob Woodward’s book detailed how Trump repeatedly misled the public in February and March by downplaying the widespread risk from coronavirus even though he knew it was “deadly.”

On Tuesday, Reiner, a frequent critic of the president’s handling of the pandemic, called out Trump for tacitly encouraging his rallygoers to forego social distancing and mask wearing at his campaign events. A day later, CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Reiner for his take on Trump’s comments amid the current state of the pandemic in the country, and how earlier mitigation tactics could have drastically reduced that number.

“I want everyone to understand, we’re about to hit 200,000 deaths. So you would have 30,000 instead of 200,000 just to put that number a different way,” Burnett noted. “Sobering and awful reality.”

Burnett then played a clip of an upcoming 60 Minutes interview with Woodward, who accuses Trump of “going down a path of deceit and cover up.”

“Dr. Reiner, how much damage did the president do by lying? I feel lying is the right word, not misleading, because he’s saying what the truth was as he knew it to Bob Woodward and saying the exact opposite to the American people at the same time.”

“The president should resign. He’s failed the public,” Reiner said bluntly. “Look, many of us have wondered for a long time whether our catastrophic response was simply incompetence or how much malfeasance was in that. Now we know that from the very beginning, the president knew that this was a lethal virus, at least five times as lethal as the worse flu. We know that the president knew this was airborne. He told that to Bob Woodward on February 8th. We also know that he was briefed a week before that and told that the Chinese was seeing this in large numbers in asymptomatic people. But yet months went on before the president embraced masks. Not only that, his surgeon general discouraged people a month later from wearing masks.”

Reiner then compared Trump’s craven negligence to a public official willfully failing to warn his constituents of an impending weather disaster.

“If a tornado was coming to your town and the mayor of that town or the governor of that state told you it was just going to be windy, don’t worry about it, and it destroyed your house and killed your family, you would want to know why you weren’t warned,” Reiner said. “Well, a tornado was coming to the United States in January and the President of the United States knew how lethal it was and failed to warn the public. If you’re trying to understand why his supporters haven’t taken this seriously, it’s because he told them not to, He’s failed the public, the President of the United States should resign.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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