Trump Has a Lot to Say About Fauci, Birx

Former President Trump was, perhaps not surprisingly, displeased with the things Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx had to say in a CNN documentary about COVID-19 that aired Sunday night. Birx said hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been mitigated had Trump handled the pandemic differently, and Fauci bemoaned the former president's early push to reopen the country. Trump responded with a lengthy statement, Politico and the Hill report. He calls the doctors "two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned," and claims those recommendations would have resulted in the US being years away from a vaccine, among other things.

Specifically, he called Fauci "the king of ‘flip-flops’ and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible." In response to Fauci saying in the documentary that "the decision we made on January the 10th—to go all out and develop a vaccine—may have been the best decision that I've ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases]," Trump said it's actually himself who should get credit for the fast-tracked vaccine approval in the US. He also mocked Fauci's attempt at a first pitch last year at a Washington Nationals game. As for Birx, Trump said she "is a proven liar with very little credibility left," and that if left unchecked, she "would have led us directly into a COVID caused depression." (Trump also recently crashed a wedding.)