Sam Stein on Fauci: Trump Is Trying to Find a Scapegoat for His Own Failures

EXCERPT:

STEIN: “Yeah, who are you going to trust on a pandemic? A guy who’s a famous infectious disease expert or the White House social media director? That’s a tough one here. And yeah, this is just a classic case of Trump scapegoating. You know, obviously it’s bizarre in its tendencies but this is what the President does, he looks at the problem as a P.R. problem and wants to cast blame elsewhere. Fauci has been off on a few of his earlier predictions, but not even as remotely as bad as some of the top White House officials. Keep in mind it was only a couple weeks ago that Mike Pence penned an op-ed saying there would be no second wave. The problem that Anthony Fauci faces is that he’s not willing to face rosy pictures about the current state of the pandemic, he tells it like it is. And for the administration that’s trying to reopen the economy and reopen schools and downplay the severity of the crisis, that’s problematic. But this is the administration that does look at everything as a P.R. problem. You know, I go back to the President’s comments on testing as a primary example. I don’t understand if he actually believes that if you just had fewer tests this thing would go away. I mean, if we had ten pregnant women but administered five pregnancy tests, we wouldn’t have half the births. Obviously this makes no sense, but it keeps going back to this as if it is the elixir to the issue at hand. And as long as he has that mindset that if we just buried our heads in the sand, this wouldn’t be a big deal, then you’ll have him butt heads with people like Anthony Fauci and try to cast blame on Anthony Fauci, because he doesn’t want to hear the actual reality of it, he doesn’t want to hear the actual numbers of it. So that’s where we are, we’re at a point where the President is trying to find a scapegoat for his own failures.”