by Hal Brown
I think you can read this article without a subscription but you have to sign up for a NY Times free account first.
I was wondering what Anthony Fauci had to say when he, as The New York Times put it (in the article above) “slipped back into the West Wing to meet with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while his allies denounced what they called a meanspirited and misguided effort by the White House to smear him.”
Did Meadows read him the riot act and forbid him from making public statements? Did Fauci offer to resign, did he threaten to resign, or did he merely give another factual warning to convey to the president? Unless he is no longer on the task force and being censored we may not know about the what really happened in the meeting until he makes it public and that may not come until Trump is no longer president.
The part of The NY Times headline that piqued may interest and prompted me to write this is the subtitle: “The visit underscored a reality for both the president and his most prominent coronavirus adviser: They are stuck with each other” (emphasis added).
I wondered why they are stuck with each other. Why couldn’t Trump remove him from the task force? After all, Trump can’t stand the fact that Americans trust Dr. Fauci far more than they trust him, and can’t stand that he can’t wish away the pandemic numbers which are skyrocketing in the red states. These numbers are real people who are sick and in some instances dying. The numbers are proving the good doctor’s warnings to have been right all along.
Are we to believe this from The New York Times?
White House officials declined to comment on what was discussed in the conversation between Mr. Meadows, who has long expressed skepticism about the conclusions of the nation’s public health experts, and Dr. Fauci, though one official called it a good conversation and said they continued to have a positive relationship. (emphasis added)
I read and reread the article and read it again looking for an explanation as to why The Times declared that “they are stuck with each other”. This is the closest statement I could find:
For his part, Mr. Trump made no effort to sugarcoat his rift with Dr. Fauci, declining to repudiate the criticism of him from his staff and saying that “I don’t always agree with him.” But the president also implicitly acknowledged how unlikely he was to get rid of Dr. Fauci, calling him “a very nice person” and saying that “I like him personally.”
Mr. Trump could formally remove Dr. Fauci from the official coronavirus task force, but that would be a relatively meaningless step because it no longer serves as the nerve-center of a pandemic response that the Trump administration has pushed governors to take responsibility for.
As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Fauci is a career civil servant. Firing him would require a finding of cause of malfeasance, and would most likely end up tied up in lengthy appeals, though the president could still seek to sideline Dr. Fauci in meaningless work, transfer him to another location or cut his budget in an attempt to get him to resign.
This really doesn’t say that Trump is stuck with Fauci as a member of the now irrelevant Coronavirus Task Force.
He could take him off the task force, just keep it irrelevant, or declare victory and eliminate it outright.
Fauci for his part is not stuck on the task force. He could resign and keep his job at the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, go public without clearing his wiring and appearances and essentially dare Trump to order him fired for malfeasance.
If Fauci was unleashed and Trump tried to muzzle him if he was still director of the NIAID the look of this would be a public relations and legal nightmare for the president.
Of course Trump being Trump, he may think that since he has the power to commute a prison sentence for a friend he also has the power to execute someone who has become an enemy.