Trump smokes on his first weekend out of the office as Fauci Clowns in it

In recent days, former President Donald Trump has observed by far how one of his most popular rivals for public attention has been released by the Biden government to partly discredit the way Trump handled the COVID-19 pandemic. And the former president couldn’t even tweet about it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was once a prominent figure on Trump’s coronavirus task force and is now one of President Joe Biden’s top COVID-19 advisers, began his multi-day blitz for different media that included expressing openly relieved that the old crew was gone that he could now serve in the Biden administration.

“One of the news in this government is that if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess, just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters at the White House on Thursday. He also emphasized to journalists during that briefing to the White House that, when he told them about how certain issues had improved markedly after Trump left office, he was definitely “not kidding!”

And while Biden’s predecessor watched – albeit hundreds of miles away from where he was last week at the height of executive power – he responded in a fit of grievance, self-obsession, hatred for the TV that largely defined his presidency. and now … extinct policy-making operations.

Fauci’s resurgence in prime time television during the Biden era infuriated the exiled Trump, who began to complain about how “incompetent” the doctor was and how he probably should have fired Fauci when he had the chance, a source close to the first president and another individual familiar with the matter tells The Daily Beast. (Technically, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a career federal employee.)

In addition to everything else that was taken from him, he lost his primary emotional outlet thanks to his post-Capitol riot banned from Twitter, just as his enemies – real and perceived – continue to dance on top of his newly dug grave. government.

And it’s not just Fauci. Trump also complained this weekend about not being able to tweet about Biden’s team telling reporters that Trump and former employees left them with a giant COVID mess to clean up, according to a person with direct knowledge of his recent ramblings.

“He feels that many people are working to downgrade his legacy because of hatred for him,” said this source.

Fauci may not be actively trying to downgrade Trump’s legacy – which speaks for itself, as infections exceeded 25 million on Sunday and killed more than 400,000 Americans – but today he is not ashamed to tell the press and cameras how he was treated by former president and his lieutenants in the west wing.

“After a TV interview or a story in a major newspaper, someone senior, like Mark Meadows, called me expressing concern that I was struggling to contradict the president,” said the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told The New York Times in an interview published on Sunday. “There were times when I made a statement that was a pessimistic point of view about the direction we were going, and the president would call me and say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you more optimistic? You have to have a positive attitude. Why are you so negative? Be more positive. ‘”

During the question and answer session, Fauci went on to discuss the deluge of death threats and harassment that he and his family received during the Trump era, which included how “one day I received a letter in the mail, opened it and a cloud of gunpowder came all over my face and chest … The security detachment was there, and they are very experienced in that. They said, ‘Don’t move, stay in the room.’ And they took the hazardous materials people. ”(He said it was” benign “and not something like ricin or anthrax.)

Now ex-President Trump, who has been impeached twice, has spent much of his last year in office denigrating and dismissing Fauci, a longtime infectious disease specialist who, during the previous administration, even once publicly suggested that COVID era decisions by Trump and his team have cost many American lives. It got to the point where the Trump White House and MAGA’s main allies devoted time and resources to compiling official memos and talking points to attack Fauci’s credibility as a science and public health expert. In the case of Peter Navarro, the now former White House chief commercial adviser to Trump wrote a short opinion article published in USA today who criticized Fauci for being “wrong about everything I did with him”. During his time at the White House, Trump has intermittently complained to advisers on public opinion polls that showed Fauci was trusted by a significantly larger portion of the U.S. population than he was. The former president would also launch speeches on how he made Dr. Fauci a “star” who, supposedly, would be nobody without Trump.

All of this happened while Fauci was still working on that government’s COVID task force, while the White House was to focus on fighting the virus that was spreading across the country and the White House itself. And for the former president and much of Trumpworld, the animus remains intact.

“Disdain for Fauci should be used as a medal of honor, as he has done so much damage to our nation’s economic, physical and mental vitality,” Steve Cortes, who served as a senior adviser on Trump’s reelection campaign, said in the afternoon. of Sunday.