Fauci’s anger at Trump is more damning than it first
appeared
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 12, 2020 at 9:13 a.m. CDT
In a
way, it’s the final insult to the American electorate. President Trump is badly
distorting Anthony S. Fauci’s words into praise of his handling of coronavirus
— at exactly the moment when Trump himself is emerging as a potential
superspreader in his own right, in defiance of the spirit of everything Fauci
has represented throughout this crisis.
Trump
is set to hold a rally in Florida on Monday night, marking his official return
to the campaign trail after becoming infected. But the Associated Press reports this remarkable tidbit:
The Trump campaign and
White House has not indicated that any additional safety measures will be taken
to prevent the transmission of the virus among those traveling on Air Force
One, at the event site or at rallies scheduled for Pennsylvania and Iowa later
in the week.
It’s in
this context that we should view the current clash between Trump and Fauci, his
top infectious-disease expert, over a new Trump campaign ad that has provoked
Fauci’s ire.
The ad
proclaims that the country is “recovering” from coronavirus, after Trump
“tackled the virus head-on, as leaders should.” To buttress this laughable lie, the ad
quotes Fauci saying: “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”
But
that Fauci footage is ripped out of context to make it appear as if he were
referring to Trump. As Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler shows, it
actually comes from an interview in which Fauci praised the dedication of the
coronavirus task force, not Trump. In fact, Fauci was talking about the
around-the-clock schedule of the task force more than anything else.
Fauci
has issued a remarkable statement ripping the Trump
campaign for using the comments without his permission and “out of context.”
Fauci also notes that his words were “about the efforts of federal public
health officials,” which is to say, not about Trump.
That’s
quite a burn of the president. (And let’s be clear, this constitutes anger at
Trump, since he approved that twisting of Fauci’s words.)
But it also points to another way in which this whole affair is more damning
than it first appears.
Why
this is so damning
Here’s
why: At around the time that Fauci uttered those words, Trump was actively
and determinedly resisting the efforts of federal health officials,
including the coronavirus task force, to take the steps they deemed necessary
to stop coronavirus’s spread.
So the
use of Fauci’s comments doesn’t just pluck them out of context. It also
distorts them in a manner designed to rewrite much of the history of Trump’s
own depraved and malevolent dereliction of duty during an absolutely critical
period.
Fauci
made the comments in an interview on March 22. At the time,
the country was consumed in a debate over whether to extend 15-day guidelines —
created by the task force — on social distancing, staying home from work and
other mitigation methods that Trump had agreed to issue in mid-March.
As it
is, Trump had to be dragged to even that point. Trump’s top health officials
had concluded as early as mid-February that such recommendations were urgently
needed. But as the New York Times detailed, Trump worried
about harming the economy — which would undercut his reelection hopes — thus
squandering “crucial additional weeks” before he “reluctantly” acted.
Even
worse, Trump relentlessly undermined those guidelines. Throughout that period,
he balked at the need to extend them, insisting the country should reopen by
mid-April, which health experts warned was dangerously premature.
Trump
finally did agree to extend the guidelines. But even so, at around that same
time, Trump was passing responsibility to scale up a
major testing regimen off to the states, even as some governors were screaming for more federal help in securing desperately
needed equipment. This evolved into an epic national failure that would hamper the response for
months.
And
Trump’s skepticism of restrictions bloomed into a full-blown call for states to reopen
prematurely, which helped drive a second national surge of cases that led
to another economic pullback. Fauci himself
had warned against that reopening.
Much of
this could have been avoided if Trump had heeded the warnings that Fauci and
other experts were issuing at precisely the time when Fauci uttered the words
that have now been twisted into praise of the president’s mismanagement of this
whole catastrophe.
The
depravity continues
On top
of all this, Trump has become a walking example of much of what Fauci has
advised against.
Trump
recently held a gathering at the White House introducing his Supreme Court
nominee that flouted social distancing guidelines, which Fauci himself bluntly described as a “superspreader
event.” And now Trump is resuming rallies that are all but certain to feature little
mask-wearing, in violation of the very guidelines advocated for by Fauci and
other experts.
In the
crowning insult, Trump is now falsely insisting that Fauci’s “own
words” actually did praise his personal handling of this whole crisis. In fact,
Trump’s use of them falsifies the history of his towering failures all
throughout. The staggering dishonesty on display here should only serve as a reminder
of that history.
