The nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, insisted he did not “get any sense” that President Trump minimized the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.
Audio emerged of the commander in chief telling journalist Bob Woodward earlier this year that he “wanted to always play it down” to avoid stirring panic.
Fauci rejected the idea that Trump misleadingly minimized the threat posed by the virus, adding that he never witnessed the president project an improper lack of urgency during press conferences with the White House coronavirus task force.
“I don’t recall anything different than in our discussions that we had with the president that he said things quite similar publicly. So I didn’t read the book. I didn’t go over any of the text since it just came out. But you know, in my discussions and the discussions of other task force members with the president, we’re talking about the reality of what was going on, and then, when we would get up in front of the press conferences, which were very, very common after our discussions with the president, he really didn’t say anything different than we discussed when we were with him,” Fauci told Fox News on Wednesday.
“So I may not be tuned in to the right thing they’re talking about, but I didn’t see any discrepancies between what he told us and what we told him and what he ultimately came out publicly and said,” he added.
Perhaps, just maybe, the hyped tension and animosity portrayed by the media between President Trump and Dr. Fauci doesn’t really exist!
http://gty.im/1228669581Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he didn’t believe that Trump was distorting the severity of the illness to the public. He said that the entire coronavirus taskforce was “straightforward” with the president and that Trump relayed their positions to the public.
“When he would go out, I’d hear him discussing the same sort of things. He would often say we just got through with a briefing with the group from the task force and would talk about it. So [the claims from Woodward’s book] may have happened, but I have not seen that kind of distortion,” Fauci said.
Woodward’s new book, Rage, included 18 on-the-record interviews with Trump and revealed many unflattering claims about the Trump administration. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump chose to do the interviews with Woodward because he is the “most transparent” president in United States history.
I really hope these political hit jobs just stop altogether, but it won’t stop because we’re gonna have four more years of President Trump after another win in November. I really don’t want to see what else they throw at him, the political climate is just toxic.