After months of reports of President Trump’s displeasure with the straight-talking Dr. Anthony Fauci, administration officials have taken the extraordinary and horrific step of engaging in a slur campaign to undermine Fauci’s public standing and professional reputation. According to this New York Times report, White House officials have distributed a compilation of purportedly erroneous statements by Fauci to various news outlets, “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document.” As the Times notes, this move comes after weeks of increasing divergence between Fauci’s admission that the country is not doing well with the coronavirus pandemic and the president’s continued deranged insistence that the country is well on its way to recovery.
This is not the most outrageous act perpetrated by this president, but in the face of a pandemic that continues to infect and kill thousands upon thousands of our countrymen, it may be one of the most telling. Fauci has both substantively and symbolically been a boon to the Trump administration, providing honesty and experience to the effort to contain the coronavirus, while providing a veneer of assurance that the government response must be somewhat competent because of the presence of professionals like himself. As we are engulfed in disease and economic dislocation from coast to coast, it’s clear that however much expert advice was provided to policymakers, it has been disregarded enough that the United States now stands as the worst-hit country in the world. In this dire situation, experts like Fauci become the enemy of the Trump administration, as their disregarded guidance stands as a judgment on the political leadership’s catastrophic failure. The respectability that Fauci brought to the White House effort is now no longer welcome, because it was grounded in his willingness to speak truthfully about the pandemic. Since such truthfulness now necessarily includes at least a tacit indictment of the administration’s coronavirus response, Fauci must be discredited.
The public will at some point turn to the question of whether the experts advising the national response to the pandemic have done their ethical duty in the face of the president’s determination to undercut the effort on every front. I think there’s a reasonable question of whether they have given cover to this administration’s failure by providing the appearance that health professionals were being listened to. While the brunt of the culpability falls on those politicians like Trump and Republican governors who chose not to follow their guidance, the broad reluctance of national health officials to confront the obvious malpractice of the politicians they serve deserves more scrutiny. Yet even such a harsh critique is light years from an outright effort to discredit Fauci, and by extension, to intimidate other health professionals into toeing the party line, as this anti-Fauci crusade is surely also intended to do.
It's not hard to see the self-defeating and self-destructive aspects of this predictable Trumpian turn. Denigrating experts like Fauci will help worsen the pandemic, while also clarifying for the public that the president’s sole interest is his own, not the nation’s. That this is all Trump and his advisors can think to do reveals not only the dire political straits they are in, but the depth of our collective national nightmare. The Trump administration is choosing to wage a losing battle against reality rather than do its job and protect the national health. In crucial ways, making Fauci into the enemy is a stone’s throw away from making the American people the enemy in the struggle to staunch this pandemic. Vulnerable to disease, perversely addicted to truth-telling in matters of life and death, increasingly immune to White House propaganda in the face of undeniable facts about the impact of the coronavirus, the citizenry may yet come to represent in the president’s mind the greatest obstacle to his re-election. And when that happens, will the president still be persuaded to lift a finger to save us from even greater waves of illness and death?