The president is in the wrong, but it could benefit public health if the scientist took a lower profile.
Down double digits in some polls with less than four months until the election, President Donald Trump has decided that it’s time to launch an attack against… his own adviser. Who’s much more popular than he is. Trump has rewritten the political rulebook over the last four years, but this revision seems unlikely to stick.
White House aides have been distributing a memo criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, and one went so far as to write an op-ed article slamming him. Trump himself has shared criticisms of Fauci on Twitter and made his own in interviews. But he has also chided the aide who wrote the anti-Fauci op-ed piece, economic adviser Peter Navarro, since this White House is incapable of sticking to one story.
All of this is perverse as a matter of political strategy and government management. Like a lot of what the president does, it seems to be based on paying too much attention to what he sees on television. The best result of this one-sided feud might be for both he, and we, to see less of Fauci.
The doctor has played several distinct roles during the coronavirus pandemic. The debate over him dwells on two of them: adviser to the president and explainer of public-health policies to the public. A third has gotten much less attention. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, Fauci leads and co-ordinates the development of treatment and vaccine protocols to fight the coronavirus. This role is more important than the other two. The consensus among informed observers is that Fauci has performed it exceptionally well.
