Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Trump’s New Coronavirus Strategy: Trash Dr. Fauci


Trump’s New Coronavirus Strategy: Trash Dr. Fauci
With zero strategy to contain the virus and cases spiking across the country, the White House is working to undercut Fauci while Trump retweets medical advice from a former Love Connection host.
JULY 13, 2020
Were it possible for him to do so without repercussions, Donald Trump might already have fired Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert whose sobering assessments of the coronavirus crisis have frequently undercut the president’s more fanciful characterization. He can’t, though, so the administration is doing the next best thing: Trashing the doctor in the media in a transparent effort to tank his credibility.

Speaking to Sean Hannity last week, Trump sounded a sour note on Fauci, who recently acknowledged being sidelined by the president, perhaps because of his habit of “speaking the truth at all times and not sugar-coating things.” “He’s made a lot of mistakes,” Trump, who reportedly hasn’t spoken to Fauci since early June, said on Fox News. According to the outlet, the White House communications office scheduled several TV appearances for Fauci this past weekend, but canceled them after the doctor said during a Facebook live last Tuesday that America’s alleged progress against the virus is a “false narrative.” The White House stepped up the attacks over the weekend, circulating what was effectively opposition research—a list of statements Fauci made during the early days of the crisis that turned out to be incorrect—to at least one outlet. “Several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” an administration official told the Washington Post.

Like many experts in the tumultuous first weeks of the virus’s spread, Fauci was incorrect in some of his assessments, including on the importance of wearing masks. But he has also been quick to correct himself, and his statements reflect the scientific facts currently available. The same can’t be said for Trump, who has, among other things, suggested coronavirus would miraculously disappear by April and could possibly be treated with an injection of disinfectant or powerful light. He has continued to downplay the danger of the disease, now pushing for schools to open this fall, even as the country finds itself in a far worse position than it was this spring. Until a photo-op at Walter Reed over the weekend, Trump refused to even wear a mask in public, consigning protective face-coverings into his boundless culture wars.

Fauci, once a fixture of the government’s COVID response, but now appearing mostly on podcasts and in print interviews, has been increasingly blunt in his disagreements with the president, who, despite a death toll approaching 140,000 and confirmed cases spiraling out of control, insists he’s done a “great job” responding to the pandemic. “I don’t think you can say we’re doing great,” Fauci said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight, noting that other major countries have managed to bring the virus mostly under control. “I mean, we’re just not.”

To most people, that’s patently obvious. The premature state reopenings Trump encouraged have led to a surge in cases, bringing hospital systems in hotspots to the brink and portending a coming spike in deaths. Florida, the current American epicenter, shattered the single-day record for confirmed cases on Sunday, reporting a stunning 15,000 new cases in just 24 hours. To put that number in perspective, the number of new cases the Sunshine State recorded just Sunday is more than the entire nation of South Korea has confirmed during the pandemic in total. There’s no indication that the dangerous trajectory will change anytime soon; as Florida reported more than 25,000 new infections over the weekend, Disney World reopened to the public and Trump-allied Governor Ron DeSantis tried to spin the numbers into a positive, with his communications director cheering a decline in the positive-test rate and the relatively young median age of those testing positive.

Meanwhile, nations that followed the science have managed to beat back the virus, paving the way for a potentially safer return to some semblance of normalcy. If Trump, like Fauci, were capable of admitting his mistakes, perhaps he would see that following expert guidance—a New York Times poll last month found that an overwhelming majority of Americans trust Fauci and other medical experts over Trump—rather than pretending the crisis isn’t happening could even help him politically. But even with a blueprint in front of him, Trump just can’t bring himself to back down. Instead, he’s sidelining his best source of information in favor of the guy who hosted Love Connection. On Monday morning, Trump retweeted a conspiracy put forth by Chuck Woolery contending that “everyone is lying” about the threat of COVID-19 to dim Trump’s electoral prospects.


“I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back,” Woolery wrote, to Trump’s apparent satisfaction. “I’m sick of it.”

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