Peter Navarro, Trump’s nominal trade advisor, claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci has not done a good job in managing the COVID pandemic. Of course, it is not Fauci’s job to manage the pandemic. His responsibility is to suggest the best course of action to the President and other government officials. His is a medical viewpoint, based on scientific expertise, and the facts as they become known. The President, of course, makes the decision on what the country will do. Or in Trump's case, what the country will ignore.
I think Fauci would be the first to admit that, if he could do it all again, he might make some different recommendations. But ask any general who has ever planned and fought a war — and the fight against COVID is a war — and they would say if they knew then what they know now they would do things differently. But time does not afford us that luxury.
So be it. Navarro is entitled to his opinion. But far from just criticizing Fauci, who by all accounts is a committed civil servant and an honorable man, he took hyperbole to a place that hyperbole is rarely taken. In an interview with South Dakota radio host Greg Delfrage, he said of Dr. Fauci,
“He’s truly evil. The most evil man on the planet. He betrayed the president, he betrayed this country, and more important, I made a very strong case that he is responsible for the pandemic himself.”
Navarro first met Dr. Fauci two weeks after reports had surfaced of a highly contagious virus, loose in Wuhan, China. Navarro, being the paranoid sinophobe he is, immediately decided this was, in fact, a weaponized virus that has been created to assassinate the US President. He fretted that a January 2020 event in the East Wing of the White House, where Trump was meeting with China's vice premier about a new trade agreement, had a far worse purpose. As he says in his book,
"I'm looking at the stage thinking, what do these commies know that we don't? What aren't they telling us? Could they be infected? And if so, whey are they sitting right next to the president of the United States and the vice president? And most of all, what I'm thinking is, could this thing be a bioweapon that the Chinese have unleashed on us basically to take out the only president in modern history to stand up to communist China?"
Apparently, Navarro gets his geopolitical expertise from reading Tom Clancy novels.
But back to Fauci. Navarro’s description of their initial meeting revealed some friction. Navarro alleged Fauci had said travel bans wouldn’t contain the virus. And after that, two minutes in, the meeting had descended into a violent shouting match.
Navarro’s interview was to promote his new book “In Trump's Time”, so it is not surprising he threw out same some extreme language to promote sales. Conservative authors know that the base needs ever bloodier red meat to encourage sales. And Navarro poured the blood on. He added (the grammar is all his)
“At that point, Fauci knew that if that thing was genetically engineered and came from Wuhan, that Fauci paid for that using American taxpayer dollars and authorized the dangerous gain-of-function experiments which turned a benign fat virus into a human killer. All he did was cover things up from there, fight the president, stab the president in the back, stab him in the chest.
If the “In Trump Time” book succeeds, Fauci will be gone by Christmas — the Christmas that Fauci doesn’t want us to have. I want him gone. He killed Americans. He needs to be fired, stuck in a chair in Congress, strapped in, confess his sins, and be put in an orange jumpsuit.”
Navarro has been described as ‘abrasive’ and ‘prickly’ — euphemisms for ‘asshole’. Former Trump Chief of Staff, John Kelly had him investigated for abusing the staff, misogyny, and undermining other senior officials — saying “If it’s worse than what I’m hearing, you’re gone. If it’s as bad as what I’m hearing, I don’t know. You may be gone.” However, there was no one better at kissing orange ass than Navarro, so it was Kelly who eventually went.
In many ways, Navarro is a lot like Trump. He has a widely inflated opinion of his abilities. And is a shit negotiator. He had his contract with Philips for ventilators canceled after auditors discovered he had paid five times what the Obama administration had paid for them. As one congressional investigator said, “There’s this public bravado. But in private they roll over and just get pushed around by these companies.” Sound familiar?
Also channeling Trump, Navarro, an economist by training, professed expertise in medicine — and was often at loggerheads with actual experts, like Fauci. He was an enthusiastic proponent of hydroxychloroquine. So dismal was his record that even normally supportive Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs grew visibly angry with Navarro during a televised interview, accusing him of “peddling pablum and B.S.” I think that would also be an accurate review of his book.
There’s more, but you get the point.