Long before he became president, Donald Trump knew that few words are savored by the public as much as “You’re fired!” We take a certain devilish pleasure in the axing of the football coach with a losing record, the politician who has hung around Washington too long, or, indeed, the losing contestant on The Apprentice.
Now, people are greeting with similar relish the news of the pending departure from public life of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Technically speaking, Fauci isn’t being fired but is resigning, but for some of us, that doesn’t dim the joy in seeing the good doctor head for the nearest exit. From sea to shining sea, Americans are throwing him retirement parties in their heads.
In late August, Fauci announced that he was finally ready to call it quits as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position he has held since 1984 and from which he came to oversee the country’s sprawling, confusing, frequently contradictory coronavirus pandemic response. In his statement, Fauci said he was leaving in order to free up time to “pursue the next chapter,” a comment one should take literally rather than metaphorically: A Fauci-penned memoir, consisting of many, many chapters, is all but inevitable.
For some of his critics, Fauci’s departure is many decades overdue. But most who welcome the news likely became aware of the longtime public health official only during the last 2 1/2 years of the pandemic, when his nerdy countenance and unreconstructed Brooklyn accent became as much a feature of the American scene as Trump’s hair and Joe Biden’s gaffes. These won him something of a honeymoon phase with the public, before his time in the spotlight wore on and his arrogance, grandstanding, and intolerance for dissent became painfully obvious.
All of this must seem quite baffling to Fauci, who has, all along, failed to read the room. Time and again, he has proven fundamentally incapable of grasping why a large number of people found unpersuasive his apologetics on behalf of pandemic-era shutdowns and suspensions of normal behavior and individual choice, constantly unable to credit his intellectual adversaries with anything but bad faith.
After all, this is the man who once asserted that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science” — Science, with a capital S, that is. Fauci recently turned up on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show to insist that those who disagreed with his actions during the AIDS epidemic had purer motives than those who take exception to his response to the present pandemic, an Orwellian formulation suggesting that some protests are more equal than others. “What we’re dealing with now is just a distortion of reality, Rachel,” Fauci said, sounding as uncomprehending as ever. “Conspiracy theories which don’t make any sense at all, pushing back on sound public health measures, making it look like trying to save lives is encroaching on people’s freedom.”
In fact, it took some time for the public to turn on Fauci — a sign of its good faith. As late as June 2021, over a year into the pandemic, a Hill-HarrisX poll reported that a majority of voters, 58%, felt that Fauci should not resign from the NIAID, but by October of the same year, sentiment had shifted: Fifty-two percent said it was time for him to say so long. Lately, there have been other, more anecdotal signs that taxpayers are eager to stop funding Fauci’s paycheck: In early August, before he announced he was leaving his post in the government, Fauci was greeted by boos and other rude remarks when he threw out a pitch at a Seattle Mariners game, an unkind reception that would have been impossible to imagine earlier in the pandemic.
So, why did we become fed up with Fauci? Is he merely a sadly misunderstood truth-teller? Or did he finally manage, after two-plus years on the national stage, to get on most everybody’s nerves? Without a doubt, Fauci’s ubiquity during the pandemic, the way he seemed to pop up with each new pandemic twist or turn in the same blue suit and speaking with the same nasally, exasperated tone, set the stage for the gradual but steady diminution of his popularity. Thanks to his decision to invite or at least accept media approbation — he has been the subject of a gazillion fawning interviews, a National Geographic documentary, and many pensive portrait sessions — Fauci became the man most visibly associated with the past 30 months of misery, anxiety, ill health, lost jobs, and missed educational milestones. Only a supreme narcissist would reckon that becoming inextricably linked with a dreadful disease and its sociocultural fallout would be a way to win friends and influence people.
To the contrary, Americans are trained by the rhythm of the election cycle to grow weary of their leaders, especially those who become prominent during a crisis and most especially those who, during said crisis, give their critics something to work with. No less than, say, George W. Bush during the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the Iraq War or FEMA administrator Michael D. Brown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Fauci produced a record of confidently made assertions (masks are unnecessary for the general public, the vaccines will deliver a decisive knockout blow to the virus, and on and on) that were, just as confidently, silently corrected or revised. In such cases, trust fades to suspicion, loyalty to a sentiment along the lines of “kick the bum out.” It’s the American way: Just as the party in charge of the White House is likely to come a cropper during the midterm elections, the NIAID director who presides over a pandemic will probably be shown the door by the time the pandemic has started to recede.
In truth, the poor guy couldn’t help some of this. Fauci is not only the victim of circumstance, the wrong NIAID director at the wrong time, but of his own seemingly unalterable character, which exemplified several “types” widely disliked among the great unwashed masses. For most of us, Fauci came to represent a kind of male schoolmarm: a preachy, inflexible, censorious scold who seemed to relish pronouncing what could or could not be done during the pandemic. As we listened to Fauci deem Christmas and New Year’s Eve gatherings even more unsafe than Thanksgiving get-togethers, as he did, with a straight face, on CBS News in 2020, we were reminded of every humorless teacher who relished the opportunity to enforce rules. No talking, no giggling, no passing notes, and, in the world of Fauci during peak pandemic, no socializing without two masks, 6-feet-apart stickers, and vaccine cards.
What’s more, Fauci’s unwavering belief in his own superior knowledge ran afoul of this country’s fundamentally democratic disposition. Americans are inclined to respect and listen to specialists up to a point, but professional experts who dole out directives without humility or accommodation to the facts — in his interview with Maddow, Fauci gives no quarter to those who feel that what he describes as his efforts to “save lives” have run headlong into civil liberties — will find few fans in a country premised on the idea of a populace deciding its fate for itself. When William F. Buckley Jr. said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University, he was foreshadowing the pandemic-era resistance to the expert class embodied by Fauci.
In the end, though, what doomed Fauci was not his status as a schoolmarm or expert but his membership in a third category that engenders even less respect among the people: the politician. With his decades of maneuvering in Washington, Fauci has absorbed the evasive, strategic language of plain old pols. In one of the most egregious examples, Fauci eventually conceded that he de-emphasized mask-wearing in the early going of the pandemic merely to preserve the national supply of masks. In other words, he kept the truth, as he saw it, from the public in service to, as he saw it, a greater good — a classic politician’s defense for misleading the voters. Like then-presidential candidate John Kerry, who said, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” Fauci was presumably pro-mask before he was anti-mask and then became pro-mask (and then some) once more. Perhaps he should run for office after he hangs it up at the NIAID — you just know he’s wondered that himself.
Those who joined the anti-Fauci bandwagon, then, aren’t anti-science but anti-schoolmarm, anti-expert, and, especially, anti-politician. And even those who attempted to follow Fauci’s directives to a T — the hardcore maskers and perpetual boosters — may secretly be relieved to see the guy head for the nearest exit. In this country, we are not built for monarchies, not even in the public health establishment, and Fauci long ago became the King of COVID — now, happily, deposed.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
