As sophomoric as the term may be, I don’t know what else besides “fake news” to call the national media’s new narrative about tensions between President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
For one thing, it’s not really “news” at all — it’s speculation by reporters, analyst bloggers, and television pundits based on one innocuous comment from Fauci, who is helping lead the White House’s coronavirus response, and a tweet by Trump related to the China travel ban.
A White House spokesman on Monday reacted to the new media-created line by confirming that Trump is not going to fire Fauci by stating, accurately, that the “ridiculous” notion literally came out of nowhere.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, baffled by the statement, said, “It’s the president who retweeted this person’s tweet, you know, about ‘fire Fauci’ so the idea that the president of the United States is the most important person on the national stage, and if he’s retweeting some person that’s tweeting about ‘fire Fauci,’ you would think it has some meaning.”
What actually happened is that in an interview on Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Fauci whether lives could have been saved if the White House had advised social distancing much earlier than the official mid-March publication of those guidelines. “I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci said. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated.”
Fauci also did not dispute a New York Times report that said officials in the White House in late February had recommended shutting down major parts of the country to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, but Trump’s concern for the economy delayed the administration’s response on that front.
A former Republican congressional candidate reacted to the CNN interview with skepticism of Fauci, tweeting, “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the U.S. public at large. Time to #FireFauci.”
Trump reposted that comment in his own tweet, adding, “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up. Thank you @OANN.”
Trump said nothing directly about Fauci. What’s more, the description of Fauci telling the public that “there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the U.S. public at large” is not accurate. What Fauci said in an interview on NBC that day was that people could continue their daily routines normally and that there was no need to avoid gathering in public.
“Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis,” he had said. “Right now, the risk is still low, but this could change. I’ve said that many times. … Although the risk is low now, you don’t need to change anything you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread.”
Part of what Fauci implied in his answer to Tapper was that hindsight is 20/20. If Fauci was in fact part of a gang of White House officials pushing the president to institute social distancing guidelines to reduce the spread of the virus, it’s unclear how confident he or any of them could have been about such a policy, when it should have been issued, or whether it was feasible without doing more harm to the country than good. He’s on the record saying that extraordinary measures weren’t considered necessary at the time and that we now know they probably would have helped.
As he said Sunday on CNN, decisions like that are complicated, and he seems to be acknowledging that, as in every situation, hindsight is clearer.
But the CNN interview and the Trump tweet proved, according to the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, that “any illusions about a lack of tension between Trump and Fauci were put to rest.” Well, okay.
In fact, nothing was put to rest. The media simply started guessing about a thing they completely made up.
