We begin today’s roundup with reaction to the opposition research the White House has released attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been sidelined from the White House’s coronavirus response messaging because he dares to speak the truth about the pandemic raging across America.
Note the difference between Fauci and Trump: One man, a dedicated public servant, offered his
best analysis and, when new data emerged, corrected himself without hesitation so that lives might be saved. The other
dug in to a don't-worry-about it position and has refused to budge as the passing months have led the US to become the leading
global hotspot.
Just as the pandemic has revealed Trump's tragic limitations, his abuse of Fauci confirms the President's deep character flaws. Fauci's lifelong devotion to science has been guided by a commitment to facts and a focus on helping others. Trump's lifelong devotion, on the other hand, has been to himself. This has led him to consistently deny facts that conflict with his ends, while he seeks credit for all that is good and blames others for everything that goes wrong. Along the way he keeps a mental scoresheet, noting who places Trump above all else, and who might value, say, human life more.
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post highlights how outrageous it is that the White House is attacking Dr. Fauci by selectively and misleadingly quoting his early advice:
It’s insane that the White House is editing claims from Trump’s own top health official to create the deceptive impression that he has not actually been far more correct about the coronavirus than Trump has. [...]
In drawing attention to all this, Trump’s advisers have reminded us that all these things — communicating with the public in good faith about an urgent matter; learning from new information even if it sheds unflattering light on earlier conduct; prioritizing public health over Trump’s perceived short-term political interests — are precisely what Trump himself will not do.
Karen Tumulty, also at The Washington Post:
That the Trump White House is treating the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert like some kind of political opponent tells you a lot about why the United States is doing worse than so many other countries in the battle to contain the novel coronavirus.
Joel Mathis at The Week argues that Fauci should quit:
Quitting would allow Fauci to speak to the public more freely about the ongoing health crisis than he can now. Even without an official portfolio, he would almost certainly still be welcome on any news network, podcast, YouTube channel, or newspaper op-ed page to sound the alarm and make the case for what he believes is the correct approach to containing the pandemic. He wouldn't even have to criticize Trump directly, since he clearly seems averse to doing so. But he would have the freedom to offer his best advice to the American public, who right now seem more willing than the president to take Fauci seriously.
Meanwhile, the White House is also putting pressure on states to reopen schools without any plan at all to protect the safety of students, teachers, and staff. As Paul Krugman explains at The New York Times, highlights the dilemma we face:
So we’re now facing a terrible, unnecessary dilemma. If we reopen in-person education, we risk feeding an out-of-control pandemic. If we don’t, we impair the development of millions of American students, inflicting long-term damage on their lives and careers.
And the reason we’re in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children’s future.
On a final note, Michelle Goldberg notes that in other countries, schools are open and life has returned to almost normal, and calls for the president to resign:
The country’s international humiliation is total; historians may argue about when the American century began, but I doubt they’ll disagree about when it ended. [...]
Yet somehow there’s no drumbeat of calls for the president’s resignation. People seem to feel too helpless. Protesters can make demands of governors and mayors, especially Democratic ones, because at the local level small-d democratic accountability still exists. Nationally such responsiveness is gone; no one expects the president to do his job, or to be held to account when he doesn’t. That’s how you know the country was broken before coronavirus ever arrived.