Trump wages war against science and Dr. Fauci, not coronavirus
14 July 2020
President Donald Trump has stepped up his war of words against Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and the leading government expert on the coronavirus pandemic. Trump criticized Fauci during two television interviews last week and then had his White House staff leak a hostile memorandum to the media listing Fauci’s supposed mistakes during the COVID-19 crisis.
Most of the statements listed in the memorandum concerned Fauci’s recommendations on specific public health measures, which changed from month to month depending of the scope of the danger. For example, in the early stages of the pandemic he urged people not to wear masks because there were shortages and he thought the limited supply should go to health care workers first.
It requires a considerable degree of political hubris to raise the accuracy of Fauci’s statements and predictions to defend the biggest liar in modern American history. It is only a few months since the American public witnessed President Trump suggesting that the injection of bleach might be a useful measure to combat the coronavirus, to say nothing of his shilling for discredited “cures” like hydroxychloroquine and his suggestion that the virus would disappear “like a miracle” once the weather turned warm.
This dirty tricks campaign—and it deserves that label, as the memorandum was characterized by the Washington Post and several television networks as similar to the “opposition research” conducted against a rival candidate during an election—is aimed at undermining Fauci’s increasingly blunt criticism of the colossal failure of the Trump administration and various state governments in stemming the pandemic.
Dan Scavino, deputy White House chief of staff for communications, went so far as to place a cartoon on his Facebook page Sunday night depicting Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” flushing the US economy down the drain, demanding schools remain closed and even (a real grievance for Trump) suggesting that there would be no professional football season this fall because of the coronavirus.
More importantly, firing Fauci, the administration’s only voice on COVID-19 with any credibility with the public, would undoubtedly generate a political backlash against Trump of major proportions. The 79-year-old Fauci has headed the NIAID under six administrations, Republican and Democratic, and clearly continues to serve in a demanding position, long after he could have retired, because of his devotion to public health.Trump embraces such childish smear tactics, rather than simply firing Fauci, in part because the doctor has extensive job protection under civil service rules and could be removed only by his direct superiors, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and only for cause.
Tensions between Fauci and the White House have been mounting over the past two weeks as the disease expert let it be known that he did not agree with Trump’s claims that there was no connection between the reckless campaign to reopen the US economy and the subsequent surge in coronavirus infections. In congressional testimony, Fauci warned that the country could soon face 100,000 new infections each day—triple the peak rate of April and May.
Fauci has contradicted some of Trump’s more ignorant public statements, such as his assertion that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are harmless, and his claim that the number of US coronavirus cases is going up because more people are being tested, not because more people are falling ill. He also disagreed with Trump’s claims that the lower death rate of the past two months meant that the virus was weakening or even “going away.” He told one interviewer, “It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death.”
Two interviews last week seem to have brought Fauci to the brink of a public rupture with the White House. In a podcast with the election website FiveThirtyEight.com, Fauci said that “as a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”
This directly contradicts the incessant claims by Trump that the US response to the coronavirus is an unparalleled success—claims that are ludicrous given that the US leads the world in both deaths and total cases. Fauci went on to say that he could understand why the European Union would continue to ban US citizens from entering, on public health grounds.
In an interview Friday with the Financial Times, Fauci revealed that he had not briefed Trump on the pandemic for at least two months and had not spoken with the president at all since early June. He explained that the White House had blocked most requests for television interviews with him and that his “honesty” was probably the reason.
“I have a reputation, as you probably have figured out, of speaking the truth at all times and not sugar-coating things,” he told the British newspaper. “And that may be one of the reasons why I haven’t been on television very much lately.”
On Monday, after the White House effort to trash his professional reputation over the weekend, Fauci warned that the US hasn’t “even begun to see the end” of the pandemic, although he expressed some optimism about progress in the development of vaccines and potentially therapeutic drug treatments.
Trump responded later Monday, during a brief question-and-answer session with reporters at the White House, by deflecting any discussion of Fauci in particular but reiterating his most absurd and discredited statements about the “great progress” the United States is making against the COVID-19 pandemic.
In response to a reporter who pressed him on his repeated claims that the coronavirus is not actually increasing in the United States, and that the rising number of positive cases is the product of greater testing, Trump replied, “We’re doing great with testing… We’ve done 45 million tests. If we did half that number, we’d have half the cases.”
Even this piece of stupidity was not the crudest statement coming from the Trump administration. That prize goes to Admiral Brett P. Giroir, assistant secretary of health and human services, who was the White House-approved spokesman making the rounds of the Sunday television talk shows. Asked on “Meet the Press” about the White House attack on Fauci, Giroir said, “Dr. Fauci is not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily—and he admits that—have the whole national interest in mind… He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”
These are words that should be branded on his backside. Trump, of course, according to the sycophantic admiral, has “the whole national interest in mind.” In other words, he upholds the global position of American imperialism and the profits of the giant corporations, which are being undermined as long as workers cannot be herded back into the factories and other workplaces because of the threat of COVID-19.
As for Dr. Fauci, his “very narrow public health point of view” consists of the sincere desire to save millions of people from a serious illness that means death for hundreds of thousands, if not many more, and significant health consequences even for many of those who are fortunate enough to survive. In a contest between those two outlooks, there is little doubt which would be preferred by the working people who make up the vast majority of the country.
All-Time Low Coronavirus Approval Rating Hurting Trump in Swing States
3:45
President Donald Trump’s all-time low rating on his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic is threatening his re-election chances by enabling former Vice President Joe Biden to expand the Electoral map, according to polls released by CBS/YouGov on Sunday.
According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week, 67 percent disapprove of the way Trump is “handling the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19)” while just 33 percent approve. It is Trump’s lowest mark since polling organizations started surveying Coronavirus issues in March.
And these low marks are hurting Trump in critical Sun Belt states that are now Coronavirus hot spots. The CBS/YouGov polls found that Biden leads by Trump by six points in the critical swing state of Florida and is virtually tied with the president in Arizona and Texas.
The polling found that “Biden has made gains in part because most say their state’s efforts to contain the virus are going badly — and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden.”
The polls found that nearly seven-in-10 voters in these states are taking the Coronavirus crisis very seriously, and “nine in 10 Biden backers cite the coronavirus outbreak as a major factor in their vote, more so than the economy.”
Nearly six-in-10 voters in these important states believe their states re-opened too soon, and nearly seven-in-10 voters in these three states think their states re-opened “under pressure from the Trump administration.”
Nationally, ABC/Ipsos found that Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating plummeted because of “plunging support among independents and even waning support among Republicans.”
Just 26 percent of independents approve of Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic compared to 40 percent in mid-June while “Trump’s disapproval among independents has risen to 73%, up from 59% in the June poll.”
While 90 percent of Republicans approved of his Coronavirus response in mid-June, just 78 percent do now. In addition, according to ABC/Ipsos, Trump’s 22 percent disapproval rating among Republicans now “is a more than two-fold increase from last month.”
Perhaps even more importantly, the poll found that “even white Americans without a college degree, considered to be a core constituency of Trump’s base, are split in their approval of the president’s handling, with 50% disapproving and 49% approving, compared to 42% disapproving and 57% approving in that last poll.”
Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating may be the most important number in predicting the 2020 presidential election.
CNN recently pointed out “just how correlated coronavirus is to feelings about the election right now” and noted that “it’s actually more predictive of voting for” former Vice President Joe Biden “than disapproval of Trump’s job performance.”
In the most recent CNN poll, which found that Biden had a 14-point national lead, “among the voters who said Biden would be better at handling the pandemic, 96% said they’d vote for Biden. Trump took a mere 2% of those voters.” Biden also won “92% of those who disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance. Trump won 3% of those voters.”
As CNN noted, this trend has been consistent in numerous other polls. For instance, a recent Pew Research national poll “found that 52% of voters were confident that Biden could deal with coronavirus. Only 41% said the same about Trump.” Biden had a 10-point lead over Trump in that national poll.
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