In recent days, former President Donald Trump has watched from afar as one of his most popular rivals for public attention has been unleashed by the Biden administration to, in part, despise the way Trump has treated the COVID-19 pandemic. And the former president didn’t even manage to send a tweet about it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, once a prominent figure in Trump’s coronavirus workforce, who is now top adviser to President Joe Biden’s COVID-19, began his blitz several days ago at various points. news that included the open expression of his relief that the old crew had disappeared and that he could now serve in the Biden administration.
“One of the new things in this administration is if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess, just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters at the White House on Thursday. He also pointed out to reporters during the White House meeting that when he told them about how certain things had improved significantly after Trump left office, he was certainly “not kidding!”
And as Biden’s predecessor watched – though hundreds of miles away from where he sat last week at the height of executive power – he reacted to a crisis of discontent, self-obsession, hatred of television that defined the sea. measure his presidency even now – poor policy-making operations.
Fauci’s reappearance on prime-time television in the Biden era angered the exiled Trump, who began to complain about how “incompetent” the doctor was and how he should have fired Fauci when he had the opportunity. A source close to the first president and another individual familiar with the matter say The Daily Beast. (Technically, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a federal career employee.)
Apart from anything else that was stripped of him, he lost his main emotional release valve due to the banned post-Capitol riots on Twitter, just as his enemies – real and perceived – continue to dance on the administration’s freshly dug grave. its.
And it’s not just Jaws. Trump was also concerned this weekend that he failed to send a tweet about the Biden team, telling reporters that Trump and former officials left them with a giant COVID mess to clean up, according to a people with direct knowledge of his recent digressions.
“He feels very much that a lot of people are working to withdraw their legacy out of hatred for him.”
“He feels very much that a lot of people are working to withdraw their legacy out of hatred for him,” the source said.
Fauci may not be trying to actively degrade Trump’s legacy – which speaks for itself, as infections topped 25 million on Sunday and killed more than 400,000 Americans – but he’s not shy about telling the media and cameras about how. he was treated by the former president and his lieutenants on the west wing.
“After a TV interview or a story in a major newspaper, an elderly person, such as Mark Meadows, called me, expressing concern that I was trying to contradict the president,” the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said. New York Times in an interview published on Sunday. “There were a few times when I made a statement that was a pessimistic view of which direction I was going, and the president called me and said, ‘Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You have to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negative? Be more positive. ‘”
During questions and answers, Fauci went on to discuss the flood of death threats and harassment he and his family received during Trump, which included how “one day I received a letter in the mail, I I opened it and a puff of powder came all over my face and chest … The security details were there and they are very experienced in that. They said, “Don’t move, stay in the room.” And they received the hazmat people. (He said it turned out to be “benign” and not something like castor or anthrax.)
Former President Trump, accused twice, has spent parts of his senior year in office denigrating and pushing aside Fauci, a longtime expert on infectious diseases, who during the previous administration even once publicly suggested that the COVID-era decisions of Trump and his team cost many American lives. It has reached the point where Trump’s White House and MAGA’s key allies have devoted time and resources to compiling official notes and discussion points to attack Fauci’s credibility as an expert in science and public health. In the case of Peter Navarro, now Trump’s former White House adviser has written a short opinion piece published in USA Today which destroyed Fauci as “wrong about everything I interacted with.” During his time in the White House, Trump reportedly complained to attendees about public opinion polls, which showed that Fauci trusts a significantly larger share of the U.S. population than he does. The former president is also said to have launched tirades about how he made Dr. Fauci a “star” who is supposed to be nobody without Trump.
All this happened while Fauci was still working on the COVID working group of the respective administration, while the White House had to focus on the fight against the virus that was circulating in the country and even the White House. And for the former president and much of Trumpworld, the animus remains intact.
“Fauci’s contempt should be worn as a badge of honor because it has done so much harm to the economic, physical and mental vitality of our nation,” said Steve Cortes, who worked as a senior adviser on his re-election campaign. Trump. , he said Sunday afternoon.
Fauci occupies a unique position in Trump’s orbit as the target of hatred, even though he was not the only member of Trump’s White House working group who was happy to see the previous administration send the package. And he certainly wasn’t the only one who remembered President Trump who derailed high-level coronavirus policy meetings with inane, if not dangerous, contributions.
“There have been parallel data flows in the White House that have not been used transparently,” Dr. Deborah Birx, another senior member of the Trump administration’s task force, told CBS. Make the nation. “I saw the president presenting graphics that I never made. So I know that someone there or someone inside created a set parallel to data and graphs that were shown to the president. ”
Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser to the COVID task force that came to leave and support Biden last year, told The Daily Beast last month that during meetings with the virus, Trump and other administration officials will interrupt repeatedly the conversations to ask if things like herd immunity would be a good policy for them.
Many experts and former Trump administration officials feared that an official herd immunity policy would get an astonishing number of Americans killed in the process, and Trump had to be removed from the brink of approval several times.
And at times when Trump didn’t offer potentially disastrous ideas about a closed-door bullet pandemic, he would choose to focus on, in Troye’s words, “talk[ing] about the media that had upset him. ”
She added: “Sometimes he would go and spend his time complimenting people on them [recent TV] appearances. He would congratulate Kellyanne Conway, or someone, on how well she thought someone was doing, saying, “Oh, you did a great job today!” this was [during meetings] when we were trying to get him to focus on the problems of life and death in the country. ”