The deterioration of President Trump’s relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci culminated in his suggestion Sunday night that he would fire the infectious disease expert after the election.
But Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, had already been effectively sidelined in the administration’s response to the pandemic and brought into open confrontation with the administration.
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Fauci was a fixture at daily White House coronavirus press briefings in the spring but has appeared less frequently beside the president since August, when Trump brought on Scott Atlas, a conservative neuroradiologist without a background in epidemiology, to join the task force. Atlas has become Trump’s closest adviser on the coronavirus, while Fauci has said he has spoken to Trump only briefly in the past few months.
“I have real problems with that guy,” Fauci said of Atlas last week. “He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”
As conservative sentiment has turned against him and the administration has limited his media appearances, Fauci has had to use alternative channels to get the message across, such as a virtual interview with actress Jennifer Garner through Instagram Live.
Fauci is a career civil servant, not a Senate-approved administration official and cannot be fired for political reasons. Instead, Trump would have to go through someone in his chain of command, such as the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar or the Director for the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, and would have to prove cause.
The United States is now contending with the third and most severe coronavirus surge yet. It has affected Midwestern states most acutely. The average number of coronavirus cases confirmed each day in the past week exceeded 87,000, the highest average daily jump recorded during the pandemic so far. Public health officials have been bracing for what could be a rough winter, with an uptick in hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19.
Fauci warned Saturday that the U.S. is in for “a whole lot of hurt” due to a lack of preparation for the winter. He told the Washington Post that it would take an “abrupt change” in national behavior to stave off another debilitating outbreak in the coming months.
“All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors,” Fauci said. “You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Still, Trump maintained in his Florida rally late Sunday that the U.S. has “turned the corner” in ending the pandemic as total cases and deaths ticked past 9 million and 230,000, respectively.
