Donald Trump’s feud with the doctor who helped shepherd the country through the COVID-19 pandemic reignited on Tuesday on the president’s Truth Social account.
Trump, 80, had nothing good to say about Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had the tough task of managing the crisis while Trump often tried to minimize the dangers of the disease and its spread.
Fauci, 85, was on the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the final year of the Trump administration, and then stayed on in a similar role under Joe Biden through 2022. Some of Trump’s supporters asserted that Fauci was trying to undermine the president’s re-election campaign, and Trump made him out to be nothing short of an antagonist.
That was made clear again on Tuesday, when Trump used a six-year-old video of Fauci throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game against him.
“Fauci told everyone he was a great basketball player, so I assumed that he would be easily able to throw a ball to Home Plate,” Trump wrote. “It turned out that he was a phony on that, just like he was on everything else (See below!). He was a terrible ‘athlete,’ and this is, by far, the worst throw I have ever seen in years of watching first pitches!”
Trump included a July 24, 2020 clip of the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases taking the mound before the Washington Nationals hosted the New York Yankees on the pandemic-delayed Opening Day.
Fauci, who was 79 at the time, pulled the ball, and it landed well short and left of home plate.
Fauci never claimed to have any baseball skills. But during his senior year at Manhattan’s Regis High School in 1958, he was point guard and captain of the varsity basketball team.
During an April 2020 White House press briefing, Fauci’s sporting past happened to come up. And Trump was all praise.
“He doesn’t need security. Everybody loves him,” Trump said—words that no longer apply. “They’d be in big trouble if they ever attacked. You know, he was a great basketball player, did anybody know that? He was a little on the short side for the NBA, but he was talented.”
That Fauci is even on the president’s mind all these years later is likely due in part to GOP Sen. Rand Paul, who this week released some of Fauci’s diary entries from the pandemic years. In his diary, Fauci mused about the origins of the virus and his newfound fame. The document dump sparked a MAGA firestorm as conservatives picked apart its pages.
The matter is likely to come up on Wednesday when Fauci, whom Paul subpoenaed, appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Georgetown University, where Fauci is a distinguished professor in the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
