Like Hillary Clinton, Dr. Anthony Fauci raised conservative hackles long before his emails were released.
Widely seen as a unifying figure in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci — the federal government’s top immunologist became the public face of Washington’s coronavirus response — came to be seen as a foil to former President Donald Trump.
Fauci became a fixture in the media, giving frequent interviews to outlets critical of Trump that often presented him as the last honest man inside the administration concerning COVID-19. “Fauci slaps down Trump,” read one headline after the medical adviser said the country was headed in the “wrong direction” with the pandemic just weeks ahead of the election. Another described him as a “fringe MAGA target.” A third blared, “Medical expert who corrects Trump is now a target of the far Right.”
Initially, Fauci publicly resisted this kind of coverage.
“I wish that would stop because we have a much bigger problem here than trying to point out differences,” he told a podcast last year. “There really are fundamentally at the core… are not differences.”
He added, “The idea of just pitting one against the other is just not helpful.”
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“He’s a good man,” Trump said at a White House briefing around the same time, from which Fauci was absent, triggering reporter questions. “I like Dr. Fauci a lot. He’ll be back up soon.”
But relations between the two deteriorated as they began to clash over economic reopening.
“If it was up to the doctors,” Trump complained, “they might say, ‘Shut down the entire world.’”
Fauci advised against resuming normal economic activities and called Trump’s conflicting mask guidance “not helpful.”
“I’m trying to do my best to get the message across without being overtly at odds, OK?” Fauci told the New York Times.
“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” he told Science magazine when asked about Trump’s statements on China and the origins of the virus.
The gradually escalating tensions, which Fauci pushed back gingerly at first before embracing his media image as a counterweight to Trump, came at a cost regarding his standing with Republican voters.
Trump eventually called Fauci a “disaster” and publicly mused about firing the doctor. But Fauci remained beloved by Democrats and independents, boasting a 72% job approval rating in a CNBC/Change Research poll shortly before the election. Trump’s COVID-19 management was widely panned and contributed to his defeat.
The trove of Fauci emails released Wednesday through a Freedom of Information Act request shows him repeatedly denying that Trump muzzled him. But critics say they paint the longtime federal employee as more equivocal in private about masking, lockdowns, the virus’s origins, and immunity for the infected than his public pronouncements.
Trump piled on Thursday, claiming vindication on both vaccine development and the Wuhan lab theory in statements issued through his political action committee.
“The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore,” he said. “China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!”
Since Trump left office, Fauci has said it is “liberating” to work for President Joe Biden instead. He’s clashed with congressional Republicans, especially Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
“The idea is that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is — let the science speak,” Fauci exulted in his first Biden White House press briefing.
According to most polls, Trump voters have shown more hesitancy to take the vaccine and trust federal guidelines, though majorities of both 2020 candidates’ supporters tell pollsters they are fully vaccinated.
The publicly released emails appear to have deepened conservative distrust of Fauci. Paul called him a liar and tweeted that he should be fired. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, tweeted, “Fauci lost my trust long before this…. The emails show it was worse than we thought.”
“If Republicans and conservatives ran the government, these emails would spell doom for Fauci,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “But they don’t, and so I don’t think he is going anywhere.”
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The White House said as much Thursday, with press secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters Biden “feels Dr. Fauci has played an incredible role in getting the pandemic under control.”
Pressed on the details of the correspondence, Psaki said, “It’s obviously not advantageous for me to re-litigate the substance of email from 17 months ago.”
