A frantic President Donald Trump devoted 200 words to jabbing at Anthony Fauci before his Senate grilling over the COVID-19 pandemic in a furious pre-8 a.m. meltdown.
Fauci, the former chief White House medical adviser who worked under Trump and Biden, will testify before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.
The president, 80, clearly had this on his mind as he opened his rant by declaring that “many more people died of Covid under the Biden Administration than under the Trump Administration,” before nailing Fauci, 85, whom he frequently butted heads with during his first term.
While it is true that more Americans died from COVID-19 during Biden’s presidency than Trump’s, Biden inherited a pandemic already spreading nationwide, before vaccines were widely available, and several variants of the disease hit his tenure.
Trump added that “Operation Warp Speed,” the 2020 initiative to fast-track vaccines, “was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS, in fact, many say, one of the most successful things ever done by an American President.”
Moving on from his humble brag, he declared that “I overrode Fauci on this.”
He dedicated the rest of the lengthy Truth Social post to hammering Fauci.
“His ideas were CRAZY! Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China. I Inherited Fauci, who was there since the 1980’s, but with each passing day, relied less and less on him,” Trump continued.
Fauci initially expressed skepticism about the lab-leak theory because early evidence did not establish it was true. That was consistent with the views of many scientists at the time, and there is no evidence that Fauci was “trying to protect China.”
Indeed, Fauci later said the lab-leak possibility should be investigated.
“He made too many bad calls, like on MASKS. Remember at the beginning he was an anti-masker. He then switched to a super-masker. In any event I didn’t let him shut the Country down, although he wanted to,” Trump rumbled on.
He then peppered in more self-aggrandizement, adding, “I went the Federalist way, and let the governors decide. The Republican governors did a much better job than the Dumocrats. Fauci was largely taken out of play, and then along came Sleepy Joe Biden, who made Fauci a ‘King!’ I called Biden to tell him Fauci was no good, either didn’t have a clue, or was dishonest. The call was well received, but sadly, not acted on. Biden went on to give Fauci vast destructive power.”
The high-stakes hearing follows a massive drop from committee chair Sen. Rand Paul, who released over 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal journal entries.
Spanning 2020 to 2022, the former top doc’s private musings detail his thoughts on COVID’s origin, intense media scrutiny, and his fraught relationship with Trump.
Fauci was on the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the final year of the first Trump administration, and then stayed on in a similar role under Joe Biden through 2022. Some of Trump’s supporters believed that Fauci was trying to undermine the president’s re-election campaign, and Trump agreed, previously describing him as a “disaster” and an “idiot” over his approach to the crisis.
Biden issued a pre-emptive, full, and unconditional pardon to Fauci on January 19, 2025, during his final hours in office.
