Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has become familiar to Americans as the guy who stands next to Donald Trump at press conferences and gently offers reality about, say, the development of a COVID-19 vaccine taking more than a year, even as Trump promises one much, much more quickly. Fauci is also known as the actual expert who’s being told to get permission from nonexpert Mike Pence before talking to the press about the coronavirus outbreak. Because public health information should definitely be partisan.
Fauci talked to Politico at length a few days ago, showing the diplomacy that has helped him keep his job for more than three decades of advising presidents and offering frequent congressional testimony. “You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don't want to go to war with a president,” he said. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”
Fauci came up professionally as an HIV/AIDS expert under a president, Ronald Reagan, who didn’t want to talk about that disease, so he has some experience on the reluctant-president front.
As for what the U.S. is dealing with now, Fauci is not making any firm predictions: “It could be really, really bad. I don't think it's gonna be, because I think we'd be able to do the kind of mitigation. It could be mild. I don't think it's going to be that mild either. It's really going to depend on how we mobilize.” Of course, to mobilize, you have to have political will, and that’s the question here. Which Fauci, in a careful, longtime-D.C.-survivor, interviews-cleared-by-Pence kind of way, acknowledged.
“It's really, really tough because you have to be honest with the American public and you don't want to scare the hell out of them,” he said. “And then other times, in attempts to calm people down, [leaders] have had people be complacent about it. This is particularly problematic in a ‘gotcha’ town like Washington.”
It’s also particularly problematic in an administration in which the defense secretary is telling military commanders to give him advance warning of anything they’re planning to do to protect their personnel from disease so as not to damage Trump’s messaging efforts. But don’t expect any radical honesty from anyone in the government who wants to keep their job.
Fauci told us the line he’s trying to walk when he said, “You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don't want to go to war with a president.” It’s a line that looks very thin in the Trump era.