It’s been inevitable that Donald Trump would tire of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s commitment to science and turn against him, but we didn’t know when or on what front the breaking points would come. It wasn’t much of a surprise that Trump hit that point after Fauci’s Senate testimony Wednesday, but it’s more surprising that what Trump got really upset about was Fauci’s warning against reopening schools too quickly.
“I was surprised by his answer,” Trump told reporters. “To me it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.” Trump’s send-the-kids-back-to-crowded-classrooms moment comes just as concern is rising about a dangerous inflammatory syndrome related to COVID-19 hitting kids. But it also comes as Fox News hosts are on the attack against Fauci and polls show Republicans are turning against him.
“This is a disease that attacks age and it attacks health and if you have a heart problem, if you have diabetes, if you’re a certain age, it’s certainly much more dangerous,” Trump said. “But with the young children, I mean, and students, it is really just take a look at the statistics, it is pretty amazing.”
Again, these words come just as awareness of a significant danger to some children—still a comparatively small number, but more than we’d previously seen—rises. That’s in addition to the danger that children will be asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus and help spread it.
If we couldn’t necessarily have predicted that Trump would get publicly exercised over measures to protect children, though, the turn against Fauci has been entirely predictable, especially with Fauci telling the Senate that reopening too quickly poses “a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control, which in fact, paradoxically, will set you back, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided but could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery.”
Fauci’s Republican critics have been laying the groundwork with Trump effectively, CNN’s Kevin Liptak reports: “By casting him as an unelected bureaucrat who is attempting to undermine Trump, they're harkening back to the "deep state" conspiracies that have fueled Trump countless times before,” and it’s working again, giving Trump the fuel to suggest that Fauci “wants to play all sides of the equation.”
Trump’s unlikely to be able to outright fire Fauci, a career official rather than a political appointee. But he can sideline him, and, now that Fauci no longer has overwhelming approval from Republicans, that’s likely to happen. The big question is how many direct attacks on Fauci that will involve.