Fauci is back at the White House a day after aides to Trump tried to undermine him
WASHINGTON
A day after President Donald Trump’s press office tried to undermine the reputation of the nation’s top infectiousdisease expert with an anonymously attributed list of what it said were his misjudgments in the early days of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the White House on Monday.
The visit underscored a reality for both men: They are stuck with each other.
Fauci — who has not had direct contact with the president in more than five weeks even as the number of Americans with COVID-19, the illness caused by the SARSCoV-2 coronavirus, has risen sharply in the Southwest — slipped back into the West Wing to meet with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while his allies denounced what they called a mean-spirited and misguided effort by the White
House to smear him.
White House officials declined to comment on what was discussed in the conversation between Meadows, who has long expressed skepticism about the conclusions of the nation’s publichealth experts, and Fauci, though one official called it a good conversation and said they continued to have a positive relationship.
For his part, Trump made no effort to sugarcoat his rift with Fauci, declining to repudiate the criticism of him from his staff and saying that “I don’t always agree with him.” But the president also implicitly acknowledged how unlikely he was to get rid of Fauci, calling him “a very nice person” and saying that “I like him personally.”
Trump could formally remove Fauci from the official coronavirus task force, but that would be a relatively meaningless step because it no longer serves as the nerve center of a pandemic response that the Trump administration has pushed governors to take responsibility for.
As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, Fauci is a career civil servant. Firing him would require a finding of cause of malfeasance and would most likely end up tied up in lengthy appeals, though the president could still seek to sideline Fauci in meaningless work, transfer him to another location or cut his budget in an attempt to get him to resign.
The anonymous accusations against Fauci were “enormously sad and totally inappropriate,” said Dr. Margaret Hamburg, who was a special assistant to Fauci and served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Barack Obama. “Never have we needed his expertise and focus more than right now. Why would we both undermine him and his ability to do his important work?”
Fauci is also a public figure unlike any other health official in the federal government, well known for his decades organizing its responses to diseases like AIDS and Ebola. In his office in Building 31 on the campus of the NIH, he keeps a wall of photographs of himself with celebrities and presidents.
Over time, he has learned to navigate the collisions between politics and health. That has never been more difficult than in this administration, but Fauci has recognized that to remain effective, he must navigate Trump’s mercurial moods and contempt for expertise. The two once enjoyed an occasionally bantering relationship, and the president several times followed Fauci’s advice to extend national stay-at-home guidance. But that was as far as it went; Trump calls Fauci “Anthony,” a name that few use for someone who prefers the more casual moniker “Tony.”
Fauci’s international reputation has not spared him from the White House attacks, which first appeared in The Washington Post and later in other news outlets. The criticism, which was distributed anonymously to reporters, detailed what the White House believed was a series of premature or contradictory recommendations that Fauci has made over the past several months as the virus bore down on the United States.
For example, White House officials pointed to a statement by Fauci in a Feb. 29 interview that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” But they omitted a warning he delivered right after.
“Right now, the risk is still low, but this could change,” he said in the interview, conducted by NBC News. “When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread.”
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, took ownership Monday of the opposition research-style effort, saying that her office merely “provided a direct answer to what was a direct question” from The Post about whether Fauci had made mistakes during the course of the response.