Former White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that former President Donald Trump hoped COVID-19 would “disappear like magic” and would get angry and yell when it did not.
Host Ari Melber said, “Bob Woodward, who is seen as a very fair reporter and like you has dealt with many presidents, interestingly went farther than he has about most other presidents. He said, this idea that they had it under control, it was not under control, it was intentionally never under control. It was a crisis and the president was not acting. Now that you’re out of government, is that a fair criticism and assessment? Or is it too harsh?”
Fauci said, “I think it’s fair because, as I said in the book, when I was talking about my interaction with him, I felt very uncomfortable when he was saying it was going to disappear like magic, it’s just going to go away, because he so desperately wanted it to disappear the way flu disappears as you enter the end of the winter and the beginning of the spring. That’s when I had to publicly get up, which was very uncomfortable for me. I was not happy about criticizing the president or disagreeing with the president. I said, ‘No, it’s not going to disappear like magic at all.’ When that became clear that’s when we started talking about hydroxychloroquine which also has something that had no basis in science.”
He continued, “It was like a whiplash where in so many respects he didn’t want to be angry with me because we had up until that point a pretty good relationship. That’s when he would start saying things, you know, I care about you, I like you, I love you, but then he would start screaming at me. It’s not fun being yelled at by the president of the United States. That was a bit unnerving but I had to continue to tell the truth. And he said why do you keep doing this to me? Because it’s the truth. I’m telling the American public the facts. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work.”
Fauci added, “When I said we might need, when the vaccine comes out it may not have a durable immunity, we may need to have a booster. He got very upset at that because he wanted the country to think that once the vaccine came out that was it, one and done, and that’s not what actually happened. So my prediction about that was correct, that we would need boosters and he got very upset at that. It was that kind of whiplash thing where we were getting along well and then I would say something that he didn’t like and then all of a sudden I would be the bad guy.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
