Day 1,369: Trump calls Fauci a ‘disaster’ on COVID-19 response and insults his pitching arm
Donald Trump’s ludicrous sound bites are whack-a-mole-ian: once one starts to make the rounds, he blurts out two more.
Despite using Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, in political ads against Fauci’s will while twisting his words, Trump lambasted him Monday on a campaign call. Trump insulted the intellect of 37-year director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, bizarrely, his pitching arm.
“People are tired of COVID. I have these huge rallies. People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said during a campaign call from his hotel in Las Vegas.
The president then called Fauci “a disaster” and lamented that he would receive lots of negative press if he fired the public-health expert because he is a “nice guy.”
In the United States, more than 8.2 million people have been infected and more than 221,000 have died from the disease.
But Trump wants the nation to forget about COVID-19 because he wants to pretend life is normal with 15 days until Election Day. On the other hand, it’s Fauci’s job to make sure the nation doesn’t forget about COVID-19, as it claims many hundreds of lives per day and infections continue to surge.
Trump’s anger stems in large part from the fact that his and Fauci’s approval ratings live in very different area codes. Trump wants to lean on Fauci’s likeness in ads for that reason, but can’t stomach the thought of being upstaged by a soft-spoken scientist.
Monday marks a continuation of weekend attack on Fauci and science in general. Over the weekend, Trump told crowds that Joe Biden would follow the science and Fauci when it came to a coronavirus response, somehow believing that was a negative.
With the campaign in the homestretch, it seems one of Trump’s final messages will be to attack a popular doctor for following science and providing factual information to the American public about a deadly disease.
1,369 days in, 93 to go
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