Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease official, is widely seen as a straight shooter in an administration not known for accuracy or candor.
President Trump has even called Fauci as a “major television star,” which must be considered high praise from the former “Apprentice” host.
But Fauci’s future is murky, reports Maggie Haberman in Tuesday’s New York Times.
Fauci has “grown bolder in correcting the president’s falsehoods and overly rosy statements about the spread of the coronavirus in the past two weeks,” Haberman writes, “And now, Mr. Trump’s patience has started to wear thin.”
Some White House advisers see Fauci “as taking shots at the president in some of his interviews with print reporters while offering extensive praise for Mr. Trump in television interviews with conservative hosts,” she says.
Fauci and Trump have publicly disagreed on how long it will take to develop and make available a vaccine for the Covid-19 coronavirus, whether an anti-malaria drug, chloroquine, could help those suffering from the disease, as the president claims.
Fauci has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, advising every president since Ronald Reagan. He has a high reputation for credibility among journalists and much of the American public.
Trump knows this, “and so he has given the doctor more leeway to contradict him than he has other officials, according to multiple advisers to the president,” Haberman writes.
Fauci was recently asked by an interviewer for Science magazine how he has managed not to get fired by a president notable for the high turnover rate among his top advisers.
“Well, that’s pretty interesting,” Fauci said, “because to [Trump’s] credit, even though we disagree on some things, he listens. He goes his own way. He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”
When Trump “knows that he has more to gain than to lose by keeping an adviser, he has resisted impulses to fight back against apparent criticism … [and] the president appears to be making the same calculation with Dr. Fauci,” Haberman writes in the Times.
So far, anyway.
