Trump Calls Fauci ‘a Disaster’ and Shrugs Off
Virus as Infections Soar
With two weeks remaining in his re-election campaign,
President Trump made the coronavirus his message and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci his
foil, dismissing scientific advisers as “these idiots.”
Sheryl Gay
Stolberg Maggie Haberman Noah Weiland
By Sheryl
Gay Stolberg, Maggie Haberman and Noah Weiland
Oct. 19,
2020
WASHINGTON
— President Trump attacked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as “a disaster” on Monday and
said, despite signs that the nation was headed toward another coronavirus peak,
that people were “tired” of hearing about the virus from “these idiots” in the
government.
The
broadside, during a conference call with campaign staff just two weeks before
Election Day, was hardly the closing message Trump advisers were looking for.
It threatened to focus the electorate squarely on the president’s coronavirus
response and pitted him against Dr. Fauci, who as the nation’s top infectious
disease expert is a career government scientist the public likes and trusts far
more than Mr. Trump.
In
increasingly vocal terms, Dr. Fauci has been separating himself from the White
House and warning Americans to “hunker down” and brace for a difficult winter —
a message at odds with Mr. Trump’s repeated, if false, assurances that the
nation is “rounding the corner” on a pandemic that has claimed about 220,000
American lives.
“People are
tired of Covid,” Mr. Trump complained on the call, which several reporters were
invited into. “I have the biggest rallies I’ve ever had. And we have Covid.
People are saying: ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone.’ They’re tired of it.”
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