Such efforts by the Trump administration to tarnish an individual’s reputation are normally reserved for political rivals — not public-facing, trusted government officials — and McEnany maintained Monday that the White House never sought to besmirch Fauci.
“There is no opposition research being dumped to reporters,” she said. “We were asked a very specific question by The Washington Post, and that question was, ‘President Trump noted that Dr. Fauci had made some mistakes,’ and we provided a direct answer to what was a direct question.”
At a White House event Monday afternoon, the president also told reporters he had a “very good relationship with Dr. Fauci,” and while he does not “always agree with him,” Trump said, “I get along with him very well. I like him personally.”
But recent congressional testimony and interviews by Fauci suggest communication between the two men is fraying, and that they view the perils posed by the coronavirus in substantially different terms.
Fauci told the Financial Times last Friday that he had not briefed Trump for at least two months, and warned at a Senate Health committee hearing in late June that the U.S. could register as many as 100,000 additional cases per day if further safeguards were not put in place.
In a live-streamed conversation last Monday with his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Fauci said the U.S. was still “knee-deep” in its first wave of coroanvirus infections, describing the outbreak as “serious situation that we have to address immediately.”
Top administration officials have begun to follow the president’s lead in piling on Fauci, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who memorably sparred with the doctor in April over the efficacy of the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment.
“Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” Navarro told The Washington Post in a story published Saturday, adding: “So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is only with caution.”
Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing czar, said that while “I respect Dr. Facui a lot,” he is “not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily … have the whole national interest in mind. He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”
McEnany addressed the friction between Fauci and his administration colleagues Monday on “Fox & Friends,” echoing Giroir and arguing that Fauci considers the pandemic response only through the lens of a “public health standpoint.”
“Dr. Fauci’s one member of a team. But rest assured, his viewpoint is represented, and the information gets to the president through” the White House coronavirus task force, McEnany said.
Fauci did not address his feud with Trump during a virtual interview Monday with Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, but he did characterize the outbreak as a “really serious problem” that “we haven’t even begun to see the end of” yet.
Increasingly ostracized within Trump’s federal government, Fauci elicited declarations of support Monday from his peers in the medical community, who forcefully defended the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
David Skorton, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and Ross McKinney, the association’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement that the AAMC “is extremely concerned and alarmed by efforts to discredit” Fauci, who “has been an independent and outspoken voice for truth as the nation has struggled to fight” the pandemic.
“Taking quotes from Dr. Fauci out of context to discredit his scientific knowledge and judgment will do tremendous harm to our nation’s efforts to get the virus under control, restore our economy, and return us to a more normal way of life,” Skorton and McKinney said. “America should be applauding Dr. Fauci for his service and following his advice, not undermining his credibility at this critical time.”