As Daily Kos covered, the new 30-second ad from Donald Trump’s reelection campaign that appears to feature Dr. Anthony Fauci, top infectious disease expert and member of the coronavirus task force, assumably lauding Trump with praise for his COVID-19 pandemic response not only includes reportedly edited clips taken out of context, but was actually used without Fauci’s permission. On Monday, Dr. Fauci spoke to The Daily Beast about the ad, and while Fauci has yet to directly call out the Trump administration for its repeated failures amid the pandemic, he got pretty blunt about this choice by the campaign.
"By doing this against my will they are, in effect, harassing me," Fauci told The Daily Beast during an interview. He continued to the outlet: "Since campaign ads are about getting votes, their harassment of me might have the opposite effect of turning some voters off.”
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In speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, Fauci stressed that he is, by design, pretty apolitical. “To take a completely out of context statement and put it in, which is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought was really very disappointing,” he told the host.
Tapper then asked Fauci what he would say if “I told you I heard the Trump campaign was preparing to do another ad featuring you?”
Fauci said that would be “terrible” and “outrageous.” Seemingly endlessly patient, he added, “That would be kind of playing a game that we don’t want to play. I hope they reconsider that, if in fact, they are indeed considering doing that.”
Here’s some of their conversation.
Trump, who has recently taken to claiming he is both immune to the coronavirus and unable to give it to others, tweeted a jab at Fauci on Tuesday morning.
More concerning is the fact that Trump bounced into Florida to hold an enormous campaign rally that, of course, did not require masks. "I feel so powerful. I'll walk into that audience,” Trump said among other bizarre statements. “I'll walk in there, I'll kiss everyone in that audience.” That would perhaps not be terribly hard to attempt to do, as the rally was held outside but there was effectively no social distancing.
On the subject of political rallies, Fauci told Tapper that from a basic public health standpoint, “we should be doubling down in implementing the public health measures that we've been talking about for so long,” including doing things outside, washing hands, and wearing masks. And of course, avoiding crowds—which is just about the opposite of a packed, mostly maskless political rally.
Biden deftly used the ad debacle to slam Trump, too.