In recent days, former President Donald Trump has seen from afar how one of his most popular rivals for public attention was unleashed by the Biden government to partially disregard Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the former president has not even been able to tweet about it yet.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, once a prominent figure in Trump’s coronavirus task force, who is now a leading COVID-19 adviser to President Joe Biden, began his multi-day blitz in various newspapers that openly expressed his relief that the old crew was gone was that he could now serve in the Biden administration.
“One of the new things in this government is that if you do not know the answer, do not guess, just say you do not know the answer,” Fauci told reporters in the White House on Thursday. He also stressed to reporters during the White House briefing that when he told them about how certain things had improved significantly after Trump left office, he certainly “made no joke!”
And while Biden’s predecessor watches – though hundreds of miles away from where he sits at the pinnacle of executive power last week – he responds in a wave of grievance, self-loathing, TV hatred that his presidency and now largely defines dilapidated policy-making operations.
Fauci’s re-emergence on first-hour television during the Biden era angered the outraged Trump, who began to whine about how “incompetent” the doctor was and how he probably should have fired Fauci when he had the chance. a source close to the former president and another person familiar with the matter, tells The Daily Beast. (Technically speaking, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a federal employee in his career.)
On top of all that being stripped of him, he lost his primary emotional detonation valve, thanks to his riot after the Capitol banned on Twitter, just as his enemies – truly and observed – continue to dance on top of the freshly dug grave of his administration.
And it’s not just Fauci. Trump also had the idea over the weekend that he could not tweet about the Biden team that told reporters that Trump and former officials left them with a giant COVID mess to mop up, according to a person with direct knowledge of his recent hooliganism.
‘He feels many people are working to downgrade his legacy out of hatred for him.”
“He feels very much that many people are working to downgrade his legacy out of hatred for him,” this source said.
Fauci may not be actively trying to downgrade Trump’s legacy – which speaks for itself because infections surpassed 25 million on Sunday and killed more than 400,000 Americans – but he’s not ashamed to tell the press and cameras these days about how he went through the former president and his lieutenants in the West Wing.
“After a TV interview or a story in a major newspaper, someone who’s campaigning for me, like Mark Meadows, would call me to worry about contradicting my president,” said the head of the National Institute of Allergy. and Infectious said. Tell diseases The New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “There have been a few times that I would take a pessimistic view of what direction we are going, and the president called me and said, ‘Hey, why are you not positive anymore? You need to adopt a positive attitude. Why are you so negative? Be more positive. ‘”
During the Q&A, Fauci discussed the avalanche of death threats and harassment he and his family received during the Trump era, which includes how ‘one day I got a letter in the mail and opened it and left a powder powder on my whole face and my chest came … The security detail was there, and they are very experienced in it. They said, “Do not move, stay in the room.” And they got the dangerous people. (He said it appears to be ‘benign’, not something like ricin or anthrax.)
The now former, twice-accused President Trump spent pieces of his final year in office and dismantled and set aside Fauci, a longtime expert on infectious diseases who even once publicly suggested during the previous government that Trump and his team ‘s decisions about the COVID era cost many American lives. It reached the point where the Trump White House and key MAGA allies spent time and resources drafting memoranda and official discussion points to attack Fauci’s credibility as an expert in science and public health. In the case of Peter Navarro, the current former White House trade adviser, Trump, published a brief opinion piece in USA Today which Fauci considered ‘wrong’ about everything I had talked to him about. “During his time in the White House, Trump would repeatedly complain to auxiliaries about public opinion polls showing that Fauci is trusted by a significantly larger section of the American population than himself. The former president would also start tirades about how he dr. Fauci made a ‘star’ who, presumably, would be a nobody without Trump.
All of this happened while Fauci was still working on the government’s COVID task force, while the White House was supposed to fight the virus that was rising through the country and the White House itself. And for the former president and much of Trumpworld, the animus remains intact.
“The contempt of Fauci should be borne in honor as he has done so much damage to the economic, physical and spiritual vitality of our country,” said Steve Cortes, who worked as a senior adviser in the Trump re-election campaign. , said Sunday afternoon.
Fauci occupies a unique position in the Trump arena as a target for hatred, although he was not the only member of the Trump White House task force who was happy to see the previous government pack up. And he was certainly not the only one to remember that Trump derailed high-level coronavirus policy meetings with inane, if not dangerous, input.
“There have been parallel data streams in the White House that have not been used transparently,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, another senior member of the Trump administration task force, told CBS. Face the Nation. ‘I saw the president present graphs I never made. So I know that someone out there or someone inside a parallel set of data and graphics shown to the president. ”
Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser to the COVID task force that finally left Biden last year and endorsed, told The Daily Beast last month that Trump and other brass papers would repeatedly interrupt talks during meetings about the virus to ask or things like herd immunity would be a good policy to pursue.
Many experts and former officials of the Trump administration feared that an official policy of herd immunity would kill an astonishing amount of Americans in the process, and Trump had to step back from the edge to endorse it several times.
And some of the times when Trump did not offer potentially disastrous ideas about the pandemic in closed-door huddles, he would choose to focus on Troy’s words of ‘talking'[ing] about media that made him angry. ”
She added: ‘Sometimes he went around and spent his time complimenting people on it. [recent TV] appearances. He would compliment Kellyanne Conway, or anyone, on how well he thought someone did it, and said, ‘Oh, you did it well today!’ It was [during meetings] when we tried to get him to concentrate on life and death issues across the country. ”