Trump smokes during his first weekend away while Fauci gives him a clown

In recent days, former President Donald Trump has watched from afar as one of his most popular rivals for public attention has been unleashed by the Biden administration to partially discredit Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the ex-president hasn’t even gotten to tweet about it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, once a prominent figure in Trump’s coronavirus task force and now a top COVID-19 adviser to President Joe Biden, started his multi-day blitz at various news outlets, including openly his relief that the old squad was gone and that he could now serve in Biden’s administration.

“One of the new things in this administration is that if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess, just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters at the White House on Thursday. During that White House briefing, he also emphasized to journalists that when he told them about how things had improved significantly after Trump left office, he was definitely “not kidding!”

And as Biden’s predecessor watched – albeit hundreds of miles from where he sat at the height of executive power last week – he responded in a fit of grievances, self-obsession, TV hate watching that largely defined his presidency and now. defunct policy-making operations.

Fauci’s return to prime-time television during the Biden era infuriated exiled Trump, who began whining about how ‘incompetent’ the doctor was, and how he probably should have fired Fauci when he had the chance, a source close to the first state. the president and another person familiar with the matter tell The Daily Beast. (Technically, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a federal career associate.)

On top of everything else stripped of him, he’s lost his primary emotional outlet, thanks to his post-Capitol riot being banned from Twitter, just as his enemies – real and alleged – keep dancing atop his government’s freshly dug grave .

And it’s not just Fauci. Trump also complained this weekend that he couldn’t tweet about the Biden team telling journalists that Trump and ex officials left them a giant COVID mess to clean up, according to a person with direct knowledge of his recent wanderings.

“He believes that many people are working against him out of hatred to lower his legacy,” said the source.

Fauci may not be actively trying to bring down Trump’s legacy – which speaks for itself, given that the infection hit more than 25 million on Sunday and killed more than 400,000 Americans – but he’s not shy about talking to the press and the cameras these days. how he was treated by the former president and his lieutenants in the West Wing.

“After a TV interview or a story in a major newspaper, a senior like Mark Meadows called me up and expressed concern that I was doing my best to contradict the president,” said the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “There were a few times when I made a statement that was a pessimistic stance about the direction we were going, and the president called me up and said, ‘Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You have to have a positive attitude. Why are you so negativist? Be more positive. ”

During the Q&A, Fauci went on to discuss the deluge of death threats and harassment he and his family received during the Trump era, including how “one day I got a letter in the mail, I opened it and a puff of powder came out. all over my face and my chest … The security detail was there, and they have a lot of experience in that. They said, “Don’t move, stay in the room.” And they have the hazmat people. (He said it turned out to be ‘benign’ and not something like ricin or anthrax.)

The now-former, twice-accused President Trump had spent pieces of his senior year in office denigrating and pushing aside Fauci, a longtime infectious disease expert who had even publicly suggested once during the previous administration that the decisions made by Trump and his team in the COVID era. many American lives. It got to the point where the Trump White House and key MAGA allies spent time and resources compiling memos and official talking points to assault Fauci’s credibility as an expert in science and public health. In the case of Peter Navarro, Trump’s now former White House trade adviser wrote a short op-ed that was published in USA Today which Fauci discarded because he was “wrong about everything I communicated with him.” During his time in the White House, Trump occasionally complained to aides about opinion polls showing that Fauci was trusted by a significantly higher proportion of the US population than himself. The former president is also said to burst into rant about how he loved Dr. Fauci had made a “star” who, supposedly, would be no one without Trump.

All of this happened while Fauci was still working on that administration’s COVID task force, while the White House had to focus on fighting the virus that was spreading through the country and the White House itself. And for the former president and much of Trumpworld, the animus remains intact.

“Fauci’s disdain should be carried as a badge of honor, as he has done so much damage to our nation’s economic, physical and mental vitality,” said Steve Cortes, who served as a senior adviser on Trump’s reelection campaign, said Sunday afternoon.