In recent days, former President Donald Trump has seen from afar how one of his most popular rivals to attract public attention has been unleashed by the Biden administration for, in part, belittling Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the former president has not even been able to tweet about it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was a prominent figure in Trump’s coronavirus working group and is now President Joe Biden’s top adviser on COVID-19, began his multi-day storm in various media outlets that included openly expressing his relief because the old crew was gone and that he could now serve the Biden administration.
“One of the novelties of this administration is that if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess, say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters at the White House on Thursday. He also stressed to reporters during that White House briefing that when he told them about how certain issues had improved markedly after Trump left office, he was definitely “not kidding.”
And, as Biden’s predecessor looked – though hundreds of miles from where he sat last week at the height of the executive branch – he reacted in an attack of grievances, self-obsession, hatred of television that he largely defined his presidency and now. missing political decision-making operations.
Fauci’s reappearance on prime-time television during Biden’s time infuriated exiled Trump, who began complaining about how “incompetent” the doctor was and how he probably should have been fired. Fauci when given the chance, a source close to the above. the president and another person familiar with the matter tell The Daily Beast. (Technically, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a career federal employee).
In addition to everything else that was taken away from him, he has lost the main emotional release valve, thanks to Twitter’s ban on post-Capitol riots, just as his enemies (real and perceived) continue to dance to the top of the newly excavated tomb of his administration.
And it’s not just Fauci. Trump also worried this weekend about not being able to tweet about Biden’s team telling reporters that Trump and ex-officers had left them a gigantic COVID mess to eliminate, according to a person with direct knowledge of their ramblings recent.
“Feeling a lot that a lot of people are working to lower their legacy out of hatred towards him.”
“It feels great that a lot of people are working to degrade their legacy out of hatred,” this source said.
Fauci may not be trying to actively degrade Trump’s legacy – which speaks for itself as infections topped 25 million on Sunday and killed more than 400,000 Americans – but today he is not shy about tell the press and cameras about how he was treated by the former president and his lieutenants in the western wing.
“After a TV interview or a story in a major newspaper, someone older, like Mark Meadows, called me to express concern that I was doing my best to contradict the president,” he said. head of the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases Explained The New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “There were a couple of times when I made a statement that was a pessimistic view of which direction we were going, and the president would yell at me and say,‘ Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You have to have a positive attitude. Why are you so negative? Be more positive. “
During the questions and answers, Fauci continued to discuss the deluge of death and harassment threats he and his family received during the Trump era, which included how “one day I received a letter in the mail, I opened it and a puff of dust came all over my face and chest … The safety detail was there, and they have a lot of experience in that. They said, “Don’t move, stay in the room.” And they got the people hazmat ”. (He said it turned out to be “benign” and not like castor or anthrax).
The current President Trump, twice accused, had spent parts of his senior year in office denigrating and ousting Fauci, an infectious disease expert who during the previous administration had even publicly suggested that the decisions of the COVID era of Trump and his team had cost many American lives. It got to the point that Trump’s White House and MAGA’s main allies devoted time and resources to compiling official notes and discussion points to attack Fauci’s credibility as an expert in science and public health. In the case of Peter Navarro, Trump’s current commercial adviser to the White House was the author of a brief opinion piece published in USA Today this makes Fauci “wrong in everything I’ve interacted with him.” During his time in the White House, Trump continually complained to aides about public opinion polls showing that Fauci had a significant portion of the American population more trusted than he did. The former president would also throw in throws about how he had made Dr. Fauci is a “star” who supposedly wouldn’t be anyone without Trump.
All of this happened while Fauci was still working on this administration’s COVID working group, while the White House was supposed to focus on fighting the virus that was growing across the country and the White House itself. And for the former president and much of Trumpworld, the animus remains intact.
“Fauci’s contempt should be carried as a badge of honor as it has done so much harm to the economic, physical and mental vitality of our nation,” said Steve Cortes, who worked as a senior adviser in Trump’s re-election campaign. , he said Sunday afternoon.
Fauci occupies a unique position in Trump’s orbit as a target of hatred, though he wasn’t the only member of Trump’s White House task force who was glad to see how the previous administration he was sending suitcases. And he certainly wasn’t the only one who recalled that President Trump derailed high-level coronavirus policy meetings with inane, if not dangerous, contributions.
“There were parallel data flows coming into the White House that weren’t used transparently,” Dr. Deborah Birx, another senior member of the Trump administration working group, told CBS. Face the nation. “I saw the president presenting graphics that I never did. So I know someone out there or someone in there was creating a file parallel set of data and graphs that were shown to the president “.
Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser to the COVID task force that ended up leaving and supporting Biden last year, told The Daily Beast last month that during meetings about the virus, Trump and other members of the administration they interrupted conversations repeatedly to wonder if things like herd immunity would be a good policy for them.
Many experts and former Trump administration officials feared that an official immunity policy on the herd would get a staggering number of Americans killed during the process, and Trump had to step back from the brink of approving it. several times.
And on some of the occasions when Trump didn’t offer potentially disastrous ideas about the pandemic behind closed doors, he would choose to focus on, in Troye’s words, “talking[ing] about media that had bothered him ”.
She added: “Sometimes, he would go and spend his time complimenting people on his own [recent TV] appearances. I would congratulate Kellyanne Conway, or someone, for the good she thought someone was doing, saying, “Oh, you did a great job today.” That was it [during meetings] when we were trying to get him to focus on life or death issues across the country. “