Fauci: President Trump "screamed at me"

Hafiz Rashid in The New Republic:

As a leading infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci was thrust into a leadership role during the Covid-19 pandemic and experienced volatile treatment from Donald Trump during his presidency, Fauci wrote in his new memoir.

Trump would “announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone,” Fauci wrote of the abusive behavior in On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, due to be published next week.

“Let’s just say, I found this to be out of the ordinary,” Fauci wrote. According to the immunologist, Trump would drop f-bombs often in conversations, including one where the then-president claimed Fauci cost the U.S. economy “one trillion fucking dollars.”

In his new book, Fauci talks about how badly Trump wanted to reopen the country and his embrace of poorly qualified advisers pushing unproven treatments, according to The Daily Beast. 

Fauci also discussed Trump’s hospitalization with Covid and his outrageous claim that bleach could kill the virus.

In the early days of the pandemic, Trump was not in a good mood. Fauci wrote about his “first experience [of] the brunt of the president’s rage,” just a few months into the outbreak.

“On the evening of June 3 [2020], my cell phone rang,” Fauci writes, “and the caller—the president—started screaming at me,” angry that Fauci told a journalist that immunity to coronaviruses was “usually six months to a year.” This meant that when a vaccine for Covid was developed, it would probably need booster shots.

While Fauci said this was common for illnesses like the flu, his remark was “wrongly reported on Twitter and in some media outlets as the Covid vaccine protecting people only for a very short time,” and this drew Trump’s fury.

“It was quite a phone call,” Fauci writes. “The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him. He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse.”

“I have a pretty thick skin,” Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”

Fauci’s time as the public face of the government’s efforts during the pandemic, as well as Trump’s treatment of him, led to right-wing figures spouting conspiracy theories about him and attacking efforts such as lockdowns and masks. 

Conservatives still hate the immunologist, and Republican lawmakers attempted to wildly smear him on a recent visit to Capitol Hill and proposed getting hold of his personal emails. 

If he makes public appearances to promote his book, as authors usually do, he’s likely to get more vitriol and attacks, despite his career in public service.

Rob's comment:

For the online version of the current issue of The New Yorker, the hed is Anthony Fauci’s Side of the Story. The hed in the hard copy of the magazine is better: "The Plague Doctor," since it's less defensive and reminds readers that Fauci was also important in dealing with the AIDS epidemic. (But the stylized portrait with The New Yorker story is unfortunate, since it makes Fauci look like he has a skin disease.)

The New Yorker pulls a quote from his book that shows Fauci wasn't politically naive:

He writes of a piece of advice a mentor gave him as his influence increased: “It’s a good rule when you are walking into the West Wing of the White House to advise the president, vice president, or the White House staff to remind yourself that this might be the last time you will walk through that door.” 

In other words, sooner or later there would likely be a choice between sugarcoating unwelcome news and losing influence, so one should mentally prepare to do the right thing.