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- Former First Lady Melania Trump worried that her husband was "blowing" the US COVID response.
- She is described as "rattled by the coronavirus and convinced that Trump was screwing up" in a new book.
- Trump told his wife, "'You worry too much,'" the book says, according to CNN.
Former first lady Melania Trump worried that her husband was "blowing" the US response to COVID, but he told her she worried too much, a forthcoming book on Donald Trump's presidency reveals.
Melania Trump was "rattled by the coronavirus and convinced that Trump was screwing up," wrote New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser in their new book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."
She shared her concerns with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump ally, in a phone call and sought his help to persuade her husband to take it more seriously, according to CNN's reporting on the book set to publish Tuesday.
"'You're blowing this,' she recalled telling her husband," Baker and Glasser wrote, according to CNN. "'This is serious. It's going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you're taking it.' He had just dismissed her. 'You worry too much,' she remembered him saying. 'Forget it.'"
As the nation confronted mounting death tolls, Trump mocked mask-wearing and suggested disinfectant injections and sunlight treatments to fight COVID. He held a September Rose Garden ceremony to announce Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court that became known as a superspreader event.
Shortly after the event, he and Melania announced they contracted COVID. Polling at the time showed most Americans thought the president didn't take appropriate precautions for his health or the risk of contracting the virus seriously enough.
In February 2020, Trump acknowledged in an interview with author Bob Woodward for the book "Rage" that the virus was "deadly" and more dangerous than the flu, even while saying publicly it was no worse. A month later, Trump told Woodward, "I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."
Days later, he was saying he wanted the nation "opened up and just raring to go by Easter."
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