The Tanned Man Has a Green Monster
Dr.
Fauci is now in danger of being lumped into Trump’s envelope of envy, the same
place in which he has placed Barack Obama.
Opinion
Columnist
·
July 29, 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top
infectious disease specialist and a leading voice in our battle against
Covid-19, has gotten under Donald Trump’s skin.
He won’t lie to make Trump look better
or cover for the lies Trump tells. He won’t paint a rosy portrait of our
prospects during the pandemic or offer excuses for the Trump administration’s
failed response and all the thousands of lives needlessly lost.
Fauci insists on following the science
and telling the truth about it, and that means that the American people trust
and respect him for it.
But,
this — being more popular and well-regarded than Trump — is heresy in this
White House. There is but one king in that palace and all his dogs wear his
collars. In that conception, Fauci is off the leash.
Trump is a man ruled by jealousies and
insecurities. In his mind he is the greater, the best, the supreme, even when
he obviously is not. All of which presents him with an ever recurring quandary:
How precisely is it that a lying, lecherous, anti-intellectual grifter doesn’t
enjoy the same high standing as the honorable and the honest, the well-read and
well-behaved?
Tuesday, Trump bemoaned aloud the fact
that Fauci enjoys a higher public approval rating than his own, even though
as Trump put it: “He’s
working for this administration. He’s working with us, John. We could have
gotten other people. We could have gotten somebody else. It didn’t have to be
Dr. Fauci.”
So, if Trump isn’t high enough to stand
shoulder to shoulder, he’ll do his best to cut you off at the knees.
The Trump administration has tried to
undermine Fauci and has even attacked him. Trump himself has openly undercut
Fauci and questioned his judgment.
Trump’s jealousies are so petty that
when Fauci threw out the first pitch at Major League Baseball’s opening day at
Nationals Park, Trump lied and said that he had been invited to throw out the
first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Aug. 15. As this newspaper reported:
“There
was one problem: Mr. Trump had not actually been invited on that day by the
Yankees, according to one person with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s schedule. His
announcement surprised both Yankees officials and the White House staff.”
Fauci is now in danger of being lumped
into Trump’s envelope of envy, the same place in which Trump has placed Barack
Obama, a space in which you must endure Trump’s endless attacks because you are
something that he could never be: an accomplished person who is also decent.
Obama attended Occidental College,
Columbia and Harvard. Trump in one breath cast doubt that Obama actually
attended those schools, saying, “The people that went to school with him, they
never saw him, they don’t know who he is,” and also suggesting that Obama
wasn’t smart enough to go to those schools, saying: “I heard he
was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and
then to Harvard?”
Apparently Mary Trump, the president’s
niece, may know the answer to a similar question. Trump has touted his
attendance of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as “super genius
stuff,” but not only did the admission officer who interviewed Trump tell The Washington Post:
“I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius.
Certainly not a super genius.” But also, Mary Trump writes in her recently
published book:
“Donald worried that his grade point
average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts
to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a
reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.”
There is no way to independently verify
the claim, but it would most certainly jibe with Trump’s lifelong record of
fraudulence and fakery.
By the way, in 2017 The Daily
Pennsylvanian published an article entitled “Many of Trump’s Wharton
classmates don’t remember him,” that included this passage:
“Out of the 269 people The Daily
Pennsylvanian contacted while researching this story, 74 of Trump’s classmates
responded. Sixty-eight of those alumni said they had never encountered Trump at
Penn. Four shared classes with him and two declined to comment.”
As is usual from the king of
projection: That for which he condemns another is often an indictment of self.
Trump, who falsely claimed to have
written his book “The Art of the Deal,” (it was actually ghostwritten by Tony
Schwartz), has accused Obama of having his book “Dreams of My Father”
ghostwritten by Obama’s friend Bill Ayers, a white man. As Trump put it:
“Bill
Ayers was a super-genius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well
recently, as you know last week, Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the
book. Barack Obama wouldn’t be president — and, you know, I wrote many
best-sellers, and also, No. 1 best-sellers, including ‘The Art of the Deal.’ So
I know something about writing. And I want to tell you, the guy that wrote the
first book didn’t write the second book.”
Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize;
Trump desperately wanted the same recognition and claims that the only reason
he hasn’t gotten it is that the awarding system is rigged against him.
Trump’s jealousy of Obama is now
legendary. Trump’s entire presidency is a stand against Obama’s legacy, to
knock it down, to erase it.
And when the history is written about
America’s response to the pandemic, the story will have two leading men, Fauci
and Trump, one in the right and one in the wrong, one working to save lives and
one needlessly costing them.
Fauci will be the hero and Trump the
villain. This is a Trump nightmare, a logical impossibility. He simply can’t
see it this way because as writer Christopher Vogler once wrote, “a
villain is the hero of his own myth.”