As Election Day draws closer and Dear Leader is hopped up on the 'roids, Team Trump's battles with science, reality, common sense, and basic cognition have grown increasingly tense. The Trump camp seems to be especially interested in pissing off infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, for some reason—or possibly just trying to piggyback off Fauci's far better credibility, having realized that nobody who is not deep in the thickets of Donald Trump's hairdo sees Dear Leader himself as a plausible pandemic spokesperson. Whatever the reason, the Trump campaign's new ad editing a past Fauci interview to make it sound like Fauci was praising Dear Leader for his pandemic response when Fauci was very really much not doing anything remotely like that is an ambitious new hoax attempt from Trump's team of propaganda specialists.
No, Fauci did not bubble: "I can't imagine that anybody could be doing more" about the pandemic than Donald J. Golfboy. Didn't happen. Fauci was talking, back in March, of the coronavirus task force—the one that now seldom meets and has largely been replaced with a new team that gets rid of the irritating medical experts. That caused Fauci to come forward with a denunciation of Trump's ad, saying in a statement that Trump's team used his words "without my permission" and "out of context."
Fauci continues to come very, very close to calling Trump and the White House crooked lying bullshit artists without ever quite doing so. It seems he has retained enough credibility, unlike other now-degraded task force members, to be able to push back on Trump more directly than the others. Make of that what you will.
All right, so clearly Trump's team has decided that three weeks before the all-important election is the right time to begin an all out slapfight with one of the few high-profile government experts who the general public still has some small amount of faith in. It's consistent with Donald's own final attack on the entirety of pandemic science now that he has declared himself "cured" and "immune" and prepares to launch his Infections For Everyone final campaign tour.
It's not clear what the outcome of all this will be. The Washington Post has a long report on the collapsing public faith in science, as pandemic science (and, specifically, a vaccine) becomes a brazenly political White House plaything. This new American skepticism of experts, though, isn't a Donald Trump thing. It's a Fox News thing. Conservatism has been attacking the elite thing-knowers and book-readers for a hell of a long time now, due to the thing-knowers continually piping up with facts that reveal conservative talking points on the economy, taxation, pollution, climate change, and you-name-it to are nothing more than corporate-sponsored spin.
If Trump loses the election, Fox News will declare that the coronavirus pandemic is still a liberal hoax, not so bad, and that any upcoming vaccine is a secret plan by "globalists" to something-mumble-something. If Trump wins the election, Fox News will claim that the upcoming vaccine is a gift from Trump himself—presuming Trump bothers to even pretend to care about such things anymore. Post-election, he won't have to. He might just declare that the pandemic is now Over and threaten to send troops to any state that thinks otherwise.
Fauci could probably do himself some long-term good by coming out more forcefully and declaring, to the public, what everyone surrounding Trump already knows to be true: Trump is a delusional idiot who is singlehandedly sabotaging the nation's pandemic response for his own satisfaction. Making such a statement would undoubtably save lives, in fact. But Fauci is likely still hoping he can wait Trump out, then retool pandemic response in a new administration that gives a damn. Most of non-elected government seems to be in the same position.