Thank God the doctor is in at Trump White House

WASHINGTON — It’s not easy being a national treasure.

“I’m exhausted,” confessed Dr. Anthony Fauci when I reached him in the middle of another 18-hour workday.

He said he has not been tested for the coronavirus but takes his temperature every day and usually has it taken another couple times before White House press conferences and meetings in the Oval.

When I spoke with him, he had been missing from the White House briefing for two days and Twitter blew a gasket, with everyone from Susan Rice to Laurence Tribe seeking an answer to the urgent query, “Where is Dr. Fauci?”

Donald Trump, the ultimate “me” guy, is in a “we” crisis and it isn’t pretty. The president is so consumed by his desire to get back his binky, a soaring stock market, he continues to taffy-twist the facts, leaving us to look elsewhere — to Fauci and governors like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom — for leadership during this grim odyssey.

Fauci chuckled at speculation he was banished due to his habit of pushing back on Trump’s hyperbolic and self-serving ad-libbing.

“That’s kind of funny but understandable that people said, ‘What the hell’s the matter with Fauci?’ because I had been walking a fine line; I’ve been telling the president things he doesn’t want to hear,” he said. “I have publicly had to say something different with what he states.

“It’s a risky business. But that’s my style.”

The first time I talked to Fauci was during a panic in the mid-1980s about stopping another virus, the cause of the heartbreaking AIDS crisis. Then, as now, he was honest, brave and innovative. He told me he tries to be diplomatic when he has to contradict the president about what “game-changer” cures might be on the horizon and whether everyone who wants to be tested can get tested.

“I don’t want to embarrass him,” the immunologist said. “I don’t want to act like a tough guy, like I stood up to the president. I just want to get the facts out. And instead of saying, ‘You’re wrong,’ all you need to do is continually talk about what the data are and what the evidence is.

“And he gets that. He’s a smart guy. He’s not a dummy. So he doesn’t take it — certainly up to now — he doesn’t take it in a way that I’m confronting him in any way. He takes it in a good way.”

Fauci could not help rubbing his forehead and cheek — going against his advice to the public — when Trump cracked a joke about the “Deep State

Department.”

Fauci assured me, despite their crosscurrents and an early overconfidence about how easy it would be to control the path of the virus, the president “absolutely” now gets the threat of “the invisible enemy,” as Trump calls the virus.

Still, Trump managed to have a news conference about public health guidance in which he ran afoul of public health guidance.

Trump has never understood anything about government, so he doesn’t know what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention versus the Food and Drug Administration versus the Federal Emergency Management Agency should do.

Trump is just a salesman who believes in perception over reality. He thinks if he can create the perception this is going to be a quick fix and there’s a little pill coming, the stock market will roar back, along with his 2020 momentum.