With two weeks to go until Election Day, President Trump is criticizing Anthony Fauci in the strongest terms yet. He’s employing it as a campaign strategy too. It doesn’t make any sense.
At a rally on Monday, Trump said, “You know Biden wants to lock it down. He wants to listen to Dr. Fauci. He wants to listen to Dr. Fauci.”
Except in his interview on 60 Minutes, which aired the day before on Sunday, Fauci opposed lockdowns. “First of all, the country is fatigued with restrictions. So, we want to use public health measures not to get in the way of opening the economy, but to being a safe gateway to opening the economy,” he said. “So, instead of having an opposition, open up the economy, get jobs back, or shut down. No. Put ‘shut down’ away and say, ‘We’re gonna use public health measures to help us safely get to where we wanna go.’”
Trump and his surrogates have been saying the exact same thing for months. In fact, just on Monday, the president said during a call with campaign staff, “People are tired of COVID. … People are saying, ‘Whatever, just leave us alone.’ They’re tired of it.” So Fauci, the most visible physician in the country and a widely trusted one, agrees with Trump, who is trying to win reelection, on this fundamental question of policy.
Yet, Trump dumps on him.
On that same call, he said, “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots, these people, these people that have gotten it wrong.” He continued, “Fauci’s a nice guy. He’s been here for 500 years. He called every one of them wrong. And he’s like this wonderful guy, a wonderful sage, telling us how he said, ‘Do not wear face masks’ — that’s a number of months ago.” He also called Fauci a “disaster.”
Depending on the setting and on the news cycle, Trump has flipped between treating Fauci as a wise authority or a liability. As recently as his NBC town hall on Thursday, Trump said, “Well, Dr. Fauci said, I saved thousands and thousands of lives,” referring to his orders restricting travel. Fauci testified to that before Congress.
Now, Trump says Fauci (who, at least for now, expressly agrees with Trump that lockdowns are bad and, again, agrees that Trump’s travel orders saved lives) is in the company of idiots, the insinuation being that Fauci is one himself.
There’s both space and good reason to criticize Fauci and officials who have been wrong and to remind the public that their judgment has limits. Greg Weiner observed in National Affairs, “Expertise — which can become both too confident with itself and too obsessive about its own narrow competencies — is not the same as wisdom or judgment.” Indeed. Criticism should be aimed especially at the notion that everything uttered by public health officials and other scientists ought to be written in red letters, as the “trust the science” faithful would seem to demand. Trump is doing something else altogether.
In base political terms, Trump has much more to lose in a Fauci-as-scourge scenario than to gain. He has seemed to recognize it too, considering that he has repeatedly dropped Fauci’s name to add credibility to his travel orders.
Moreover, Fauci remains popular, with 56% of independents and 54% of Republicans telling Morning Consult that they think he has done a good or excellent job handling the pandemic. His popularity among liberals and Democrats is much higher. They are quite annoyingly walking around Washington sporting “We are all Fauci” T-shirts, with an image of the doctor resting his face in his palm. The people who wear Fauci T-shirts are not likely obtainable voters, but they are beside the point. There are presumably voters at the margins who think Fauci is respectable, and a Trump victory will be won at the margins.
It should be noted that what set Trump off was the same 60 Minutes interview, in which Fauci said he was not surprised that the president came down with COVID-19. He said Trump was in a “precarious situation” at the Amy Coney Barrett announcement, an event in which there was little distancing or masking. But what else could he say? Trump put himself in that “precarious situation.”
Fauci has his own problems. His virtual omnipresence, on magazine covers and pop-culture podcasts, seems totally self-serving. It’s just a terrible look for a public health official to pose by his pool during a pandemic caused by the most “puzzling” (his word) virus he has ever seen. He even said on 60 Minutes that the White House has been restricting his media appearances, though that strains credulity. Fauci is everywhere. “One of the most trusted voices in America, and yet, you’re not there, you’re not allowed to talk with us,” CBS’s Jonathan LaPook said to Fauci, who was very much “there” and talking with him.
Fauci is not beyond reproach, but he commands respect. Trump followed his lead, more or less, at the outset for a reason. Now, Trump tries to have it both ways, invoking Fauci on certain occasions and castigating him on others. It’s just a bizarre and incoherent pitch to voters. Trump helps his electoral chances (and the public’s confidence in his judgment and his administration’s coronavirus response more broadly) by showcasing where he and Fauci agree rather than creating these new fault lines.
