In his decades as a journalist covering D.C. politics, there’s likely not much All The President’s Men coauthor Bob Woodward hasn’t seen. Even so, one interview with Donald Trump left him “as stunned as I’ve ever been as a reporter” when the former president told him what he’d said to his young son Barron, who was 13 at the time, about the coronavirus.

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN Tonight, Woodward shared audio of Trump telling him what he’d told Barron during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. The audio was part of a series of recorded interviews that were included in his book Rage, HuffPost reports. They have since been released separately as The Trump Tapes.

In a March 19, 2020 interview, Trump said Barron had asked him what was going on. His answer?

“I said, it came out of China, Barron. Pure and simple. And it should’ve been stopped. And to be honest with you Barron, they should have let it be known it was a problem two months earlier… the world wouldn’t have a problem. We could have stopped it easily.”

That didn’t sit completely well with Jake Tapper, host of CNN Tonight. He reminded viewers that while some of the blame does lie with the Chinese government for covering up the initial stages of the virus but added Trump was warned about the very real dangers the virus posed but sat on his hands.

At the time of the interview, Woodward said he wasn’t aware that Trump had already been warned of the dangers of the virus by his national security advisers. When Woodward did find out about the warning, he listened to the tape again. He came away with this conclusion: “My God, Trump is conning not just me, but his son and he is laying out, ‘Oh, this could have been fixed, the Chinese could have done something about it.”

“Donald Trump could have done something about it by being honest and warning the public that he has constitutional and moral responsibility to do so,” Woodward said.

Instead, he pushed fake cures like bleach and hydroxychloroquine when all of the efforts of his administration should have gone towards warning the public and seeking a vaccine early on, which he didn’t do. Another ugly aspect of this is it resulted in scores of hate crimes committed against Asian people. HealthAffairs reports that the FBI documented a 77 percent rise in hate crimes against Asian people from 2019 to 2020. From March 2020 to 2021 at least 9000 incidents of anti-Asian hate were self-reported to the Asian advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate.

This is what makes Trump a dangerous man. These seemingly random, off-the-cuff remarks fueled hate crimes against innocent people because his supporters are just that demented. January 6, 2021, made that abundantly clear.

I’m including Jake Tapper’s interview with Bob Woodward in the clip below. All I can say is it’s pretty telling.