‘Fauci’s a disaster’: Trump attacks health officials in fiery campaign call
By Quint Forgey
Politico
October 19, 2020
President Donald Trump attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci and his administration’s other public health officials as “idiots” in a heated call with his campaign staff Monday, even musing about potentially firing the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
“People are tired of Covid. People are saying, ‘Whatever, just leave us alone.’ People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said on the call, which included press.
“He’s been here for, like, 500 years. He’s like this wonderful sage telling us how — Fauci, if we listened to him, we’d have 700,000 [or] 800,000 deaths.”
Trump described Fauci as a “disaster” and added that “every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb. But there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him.”
The president also presented himself as unconcerned by the prospect of his comments being circulated by the media, saying: “If there’s a reporter on, you can have it just the way I said it. I couldn’t care less.”
Trump took his feud with Fauci public later Monday in a pair of tweets that mentioned the immunologist’s media presence and mocked his bungled first pitch on Major League Baseball’s Opening Day in July.
“Dr.Tony Fauci says we don’t allow him to do television, and yet I saw him last night on @60Minutes, and he seems to get more airtime than anybody since the late, great, Bob Hope,” Trump wrote. “All I ask of Tony is that he make better decisions. He said ‘no masks & let China in’. Also, Bad arm!”
Trump went on to insist that Fauci “should stop wearing” his signature face mask featuring the logo for the Washington Nationals baseball team “for two reasons.”
“Number one, it is not up to the high standards that he should be exposing,” Trump wrote. “Number two, it keeps reminding me that Tony threw out perhaps the worst first pitch in the history of Baseball!”
After arriving in Arizona ahead of a campaign rally there Monday afternoon, Trump told reporters that Fauci “is a very nice man,” but that he sometimes “says things that are a little bit off, and they get built up, unfortunately.”
“He’s a nice guy. I like him, but he’s called a lot of bad calls,” Trump said, adding: “I don’t want to hurt him. He’s been there for about 350 years.”
The sustained assault by the president prompted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate health committee, to issue a statement in support of Fauci that implicitly rebuked Trump’s language.
“Dr. Fauci is one of our country’s most distinguished public servants. He has served six presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan,” Alexander, who will retire at the end of this year, said. “If more Americans paid attention to his advice, we’d have fewer cases of COVID-19, and it would be safer to go back to school and back to work and out to eat.”
The president’s anger Monday seemed at least partly provoked by a series of frank remarks Fauci made about Trump and the federal government’s pandemic response in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday.
Fauci said Trump is reluctant to cover his face in public because he “equates wearing a mask with weakness,” and argued that the president’s frequent refusal to model the personal mitigation measure is “less an anti-science [position] than it’s more a statement.”
“You know, a statement of strength,” Fauci said. “Like, ‘We’re strong. We don’t need a mask.’ That kind of thing.”
Asked whether it made sense to him to view mask-wearing through such a lens of strength or weakness, Fauci responded: “No, it doesn’t. Of course not.”
Fauci also asserted that there has been a “restriction” on the flow of public health information from the administration, and said the White House had blocked him from making several media appearances.
“You know, I think you’d have to be honest and say yes. I certainly have not been allowed to go on many, many, many shows that have asked for me,” he said.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah rejected Fauci’s claim Monday, telling Fox News that the process of booking administration officials for interviews is “a little more complicated than that.”
Farah said the White House was “not limiting his television presence” and contended that there has not been “a more visible figure around coronavirus” than Fauci.
“Dr. Fauci has been on an incredible amount of TV,” she said. “It’s hard to turn on the TV and not see him. And we’re certainly not trying to stifle him sharing important information with the public.”
Fauci did offer some form of praise for the president Sunday when he said he thought that “deep down, [Trump] believes in science.”
“If he didn’t,” Fauci said, “he would not have entrusted his health to the very competent physicians at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.”
Trump was treated at the Maryland military hospital for three days earlier this month after contracting Covid-19. But even after being discharged, he has continued to decline to wear masks at many public events.
In fact, upon his return to the White House after his stay at Walter Reed, the presumably still-contagious president ascended the steps to the Truman Balcony and removed his mask to pose and salute for the cameras before entering the executive mansion.
Trump has resumed his campaign schedule in the final weeks of the presidential race, headlining packed rallies in swing states attended by mostly maskless crowds and urging Americans to go about their normal lives with little regard for the pandemic.
Trump was pressed on his failure to more forcefully advocate mask-wearing at an NBC town hall event last Thursday, during which he only expressed approval of masks and did not encourage their use.
Asked about the results of a University of Washington study from July that predicted the nation’s daily death toll could be reduced by more than 66 percent with universal mask-wearing, Trump said there were “other people that disagree” and invoked Scott Atlas — the White House’s controversial new health adviser.
“Scott Atkins, if you look at Scott, Dr. Scott,” Trump said, apparently misremembering Atlas’ name. “He’s from — great guy. Stanford. He will tell you that. He disagrees with you.”
Atlas is a physician with no expertise in infectious diseases or epidemiology, known for his rosier assessments of the pandemic’s threat and resistance to coronavirus restrictions.
Atlas has reportedly been urging the White House to embrace a strategy of herd immunity through mass infection to quash the public health crisis, but has denied advocating such an approach.
Trump also distorted data from a study published last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assert that 85 percent of people who wear masks become infected — a false claim he made on several occasions last Thursday.
Trump noted that Fauci did not endorse mask-wearing in the initial stage of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak. But neither did other administration officials at the time, and the CDC began recommending the use of cloth masks when outside the home by early April.
Fauci acknowledged in June that the administration was slow to promote mask-wearing because of concerns among the public health community regarding a shortage of personal protective equipment in the U.S.
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