Trump rails against Fauci
Infectious disease chief called ‘disaster’ as debate looms
PRESCOTT, Ariz. — President Donald Trump came out swinging Monday at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the press and polls that show him trailing Democrat Joe Biden in key battleground states in a disjointed closing message two weeks before Election Day.
On the third day of a western campaign swing, Trump was facing intense pressure to turn around his campaign, hoping for the type of last-minute surge that gave him a come-from-behind victory four years ago. But his inconsistent message, the newly rising virus cases and his attacks on experts like Fauci could undermine his final efforts to appeal to voters outside his most loyal base.
Still Trump insisted he was confident as he executed an aggressive travel schedule.
“We’re going to win,” he told campaign staff on a morning conference call from Las Vegas. He went on to acknowledge: “I wouldn’t have told you that maybe two or three weeks ago,” referring to the days when he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
Seeking to shore up the morale of his staff, Trump blasted his government’s own scientific experts as too negative, even as his handling of the pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans remains a central issue to voters.
“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said of the government’s top infectious disease expert. “Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb. But there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. But Fauci’s a disaster.”
At a rally in Prescott, Arizona, Trump assailed Biden for pledging to heed the advice of scientific experts, saying dismissively that his rival “wants to listen to Dr. Fauci.”
The doctor is both respected and popular, and Trump’s rejection of scientific advice on the pandemic has already drawn bipartisan condemnation.
At his rally, Trump also ramped up his attacks on the news media, singling out NBC’s Kristen Welker, the moderator of the
next presidential debate, as well as CNN for aggressively covering a pandemic that is infecting tens of thousands of Americans every day.
Fauci, in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, said he was not surprised that Trump contracted the virus after he held a series of large events with few face coverings. Fauci also objected to the president’s campaign using his words in a campaign ad.
“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,” Fauci said of the president.
Trump’s comments drew a defense of Fauci from Tennessee GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander, who praised the doctor as one of the nation’s “most distinguished public servants.”
As Trump turned his flouting of scientific advice into a campaign applause line, Alexander added that, if more Americans had heeded Fauci’s 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.”
Biden was off the campaign trail on Monday ahead of Thursday’s second and final debate. His campaign praised Fauci
while saying that “Trump’s reckless and negligent leadership threatens to put more lives at risk.”
“Trump’s closing message in the final days of the 2020 race is to publicly mock Joe Biden for trusting science and to call Dr. Fauci, the leading public health official on
COVID-19, a ‘disaster’ and other public health officials ‘idiots,’ ” the campaign said. “Trump is mocking Biden for listening to science. Science.”
In his call with campaign staffers before rallies in Prescott and Tucson, Trump urged his supporters to work as hard as possible during the race’s final stretch.
“Get off this phone” and get to work, he told campaign organizers.
Monday’s professed confidence in victory stood in contrast to some of Trump’s other public comments in recent days reflecting on the prospect that he could lose.
“Could you imagine if I lose my whole life? What am I going to do?” he asked a rally crowd in Macon, Georgia. “I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.”
In Janesville, Wisconsin, over the weekend, he said wasn’t “even conceivable” that he could lose to a man he labeled “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics.”
Trump has also expressed confusion about polling data that shows him trailing or closely matched with Biden in key states.
“How the hell can we be tied?” he said at a rally in Carson City, Nevada, where polls actually show Biden ahead. “What’s going on? We get these massive crowds. He gets nobody. And then they say we’re tied. It doesn’t make sense.”
Biden, meanwhile, was in Delaware for several days of preparation ahead of Thursday’s final presidential debate.
His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, returned to the campaign trail after several days in Washington after a close adviser and two other staffers tested positive for the coronavirus.