Donald Trump has been trying to hit Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) over his rival’s record on COVID — and to deflect criticism from himself for his failure to fire Anthony Fauci. Earlier this week, the Trump campaign sent out an email pointing to a CNN article noting that DeSantis had praised Anthony Fauci for ‘really doing a good job’ back in 2020.
“You have a lot of people there who are working very, very hard, and they’re not getting a lot of sleep,” DeSantis said at the time during a briefing on Florida’s response. “And they’re really focusing on a big country that we have. And from Dr. Birx to Dr. Fauci to the vice president, who’s worked very hard, the surgeon general, they’re really doing a good job. It’s a tough, tough situation, but they’re working hard.”
One key fact that the Trump campaign hopes you don’t pick up on is that this praise was made on March 25, 2020. That was so early in the COVID era that the World Health Organization had only declared a pandemic two weeks prior, on March 11. There was very little reason at that point to distrust Fauci based on what we knew at the time. Democrats and Republicans trusted the nation’s health bureaucracy to have the best intentions and, as such, followed its recommendations.
When it became clear that their recommendations weren’t helping, many Republican governors, including DeSantis, started reopening their states. I don’t fault them for thinking they’d been doing the right thing at first, nor do I fault Trump for following Fauci’s recommendations at the beginning. The question is, was there a point at which Trump should have done something about it, and reined in Fauci?
According to DeSantis, absolutely. During an appearance on “America’s Newsroom” on Fox News, the Florida gov argued that Trump must “take responsibility” for Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Related: DeSantis vs. Trump on COVID Response: Who’s Right?
“Well, look, at the end of the day, the leader’s got to take responsibility. I think it was pretty clear early on in COVID that Fauci was misfiring. He was elevated to where his pronouncements were basically viewed as gospel around the country, and we rejected that and we fought,” DeSantis said. “When we re-opened the state, he criticized us. When we had kids in school — first state in the country to have all school districts — he criticized us. When we said no vax mandates, they criticized us. So, we had to chart the course, and obviously, the results speak for themselves.”
DeSantis contrasted this with Trump by pointing out that, in October 2020, Trump’s re-election campaign was running ads featuring Fauci bragging that Trump did everything he told him to do.
“They were putting that out. They were bragging about it,” DeSantis pointed out.
Trump claimed in an interview this week with Hugh Hewitt that he wasn’t allowed to fire Fauci — a claim that DeSantis disputes.
In addition to never firing Fauci, Trump awarded him a Presidential Commendation on his last day in office. That sure sounds like an endorsement of everything that Fauci did during the pandemic to me.
Trump has tried to change the narrative about the pandemic, but he doubles down on the vaccines, and the fact is he can’t change how things went down with Fauci. He’d do himself good to own up to his mistake and make it a key platform position to ensure such abuses by the health bureaucracy never happen again.