Fauci on what working for Trump really looked like

When did you first realize that things were going wrong between you and President Trump?

This coincided a lot with the rapid escalation of cases in the northeast of the country, especially in the New York metro area. I was trying to express the gravity of the situation, and the president’s response was always oriented, “Well, it’s not that bad, is it?” And I would say, “Yeah, that’s so bad.” It was almost a knee-jerk response, trying to persuade you to play it down. Not saying, “I want you to downplay it”, but “Oh, really, was that so bad?”

And the other thing that really worried me was that it was clear that he was getting comments from people calling him, I don’t know who, people he knew in the business world, saying: “Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great? or, “Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.” And I would try, you know, to calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing a proper clinical trial; you get the information, you subject it to peer review. And he was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that stuff really works.”

He would take their opinion – based on no data, just an anecdote – that something might really matter just as seriously. It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative medicine-type approaches. It was always, “Some guy called me, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.” It was then that my anxiety started to escalate.

Did you have any problems with him during the first three years of his presidency?

No, he barely knew who I was. The first time I met him was in September 2019 when they asked me to come to the White House, bring my white coat and stay there as he signed an executive order regarding something. regarding the flu. Then, from January, February 2020, it was intense involvement that descended very, very frequently in the White House.

There was a time last February when things changed. Alex Azar was leading the White House Coronavirus Task Force, then suddenly Mike Pence, and President Trump was at the podium answering questions and arguing with reporters. What happened?

To be completely honest with you, I don’t know. We had, you know, the standard type of science-based public health meeting. Then I started to worry that this was not going in the right direction – the anecdotal situations, the minimization, the president surrounding himself with people saying things that made no scientific sense. We would say things like, “This is an epidemic. Infectious diseases take their own course unless something is done about it. And then he would get up and start talking: “It’s going to disappear, it’s magic, it’s going to disappear.”