Trump attacks Fauci as ‘a disaster’ and dismisses fears about the still-raging coronavirus.
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October 19, 2020
President Trump attacked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist, as “a disaster” on Monday and said, despite experts’ warnings that the nation was headed toward another peak in the coronavirus outbreak, that people were “tired” of hearing about the virus and wanted to be left alone.
The president issued his first broadsides against Dr. Fauci on Monday morning during a call with campaign staff that reporters listened in on, but then amplified them on Twitter and in remarks to reporters after landing in Arizona for a pair of rallies.
“People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong,” Mr. Trump said in the call with campaign staff, which began with his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, talking about the Republican ground game and other factors that he said supported Mr. Trump’s path to victory.
Mr. Trump also called Dr. Fauci a “nice” guy, but he said, “He’s been here for 500 years,” and added, “Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. This guy’s a disaster.”
The attack on Dr. Fauci comes as the United States has seen more coronavirus cases — over 8 million — and more deaths — nearly 220,000 — than any other nation in the world.The president’s advisers have tried to get him to lay off the infectious diseases specialist, who remains popular.
It also comes after Dr. Fauci, in an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday, dismissed the president’s claim that the end of the pandemic was just around the corner. Dr. Fauci said during the interview that he was not surprised that Mr. Trump had contracted the virus, citing the failure to take basic precautions at White House events, including the announcement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
“I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask,” Dr. Fauci said. “When I saw that on TV, I said, ‘Oh my goodness. Nothing good can come out of that, that’s got to be a problem.’ And then sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event.”
And after “60 Minutes” reported that the Trump administration had restricted Dr. Fauci’s media appearances, Mr. Trump struck back on Twitter. In a pair of tweets, he complained that Dr. Fauci “seems to get more airtime than anybody since the late, great, Bob Hope,” adding, “All I ask of Tony is that he make better decisions.” The president also criticized Dr. Fauci for “perhaps the worst first pitch in the history of Baseball!”
He continued his criticism of Dr. Fauci after landing in Arizona for the first of two scheduled rallies in the state, which is experiencing a rise in coronavirus cases.
Speaking to reporters after deplaning Air Force One, Mr. Trump called Dr. Fauci “a very nice man” but complained that he “loves being on television” and has made “a lot of bad calls.” Asked why he didn’t fire Dr. Fauci, Mr. Trump said, “He’s been there for about 350 years. I don’t want to hurt him.”
Mr. Trump’s attacks on Dr. Fauci led Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to become the latest Republican to distance himself from the president. “Dr. Fauci is one of our country’s most distinguished public servants,” said Mr. Alexander, who is retiring this year. “He has served six presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan. If more Americans paid attention to his advice, we’d have fewer cases of Covid-19, and it would be safer to go back to school and back to work and out to eat.”
Mr. Trump has bristled at Dr. Fauci’s superior approval ratings. A poll released late last month by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that 68 percent of Americans trusted Dr. Fauci either a great deal or a fair amount to provide reliable information about the virus, while only 40 percent trusted Mr. Trump.
— Maggie Haberman and
In-person early voting begins this week in Florida and Wisconsin, where Trump needs to win.
Early voting is kicking off this week in two hotly contested battlegrounds, Florida and Wisconsin, with indications that the record-shattering early turnout seen last week in Georgia, Texas and North Carolina will be repeated in these must-win states for President Trump.
In all, 11 states will allow voters to begin casting ballots this week, with Florida opening up its polls on Monday and Wisconsin’s early-voting period kicking off on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump won both states by about 1 percentage point in 2016, but Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds durable if modest leads in polls of likely voters.
Monday morning, hundreds of people lined up outside polling stations in South Florida, despite early-morning downpours — with a rainbow appearing over Miami Gardens to the delight over voters waiting to cast ballots.
Polls will remain open for early voting through the end of the month.
Other states to open at least some polling locations this week include Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.
As the polls open, the registration period for voting by mail is closing this week in Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri and New Mexico.
Turnout for early voting broke records in some parts of Texas and Georgia, especially urban and suburban areas with high concentrations of Democratic voters. Some states, Georgia in particular, have been grappling with technical issues that have created long delays. Other states, like Texas, are locked in partisan legal battles over voter access and the use of drop boxes to enable easier voting amid the pandemic.
In general, Democrats are more open to using alternative voting methods — either by mail or by voting early in person — than Republicans, putting intense pressure on the Republican Party to get out the vote on Election Day.
The Florida Division of Elections reported on Saturday that 49 percent of mail-in ballots received so far had come from Democrats, compared with 30 percent from Republicans. The other 21 percent came from unaffiliated or third-party voters, many of whom lean to the right in Florida, making it difficult to assess whether Democrats have a large lead in mail-in voting.
There is no doubt, however, about the scale of the balloting. Many counties, especially in Democratic cities and suburban areas, are reporting record-breaking tallies.
The Florida division reported that 2,423,573 people — more than 17 percent of the state’s registered voters — had already mailed in ballots.
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