Every good story needs a villain – and for Donald Trump’s improbable comeback run, he’s casting Dr. Anthony Fauci in that role.
According to a new report in Axios, Trump plans to vilify the nation’s top infectious disease expert in a speech tonight.
Jason Miller, a senior advisor to the former president, told Axios that Trump supporters have a “visceral” reaction to Fauci. “People see Anthony Fauci and they think of shuttered businesses, lost school,” he said.
Fauci has long been a target of Republicans and right-wing media in search of a scapegoat to explain away Trump’s inconsistent COVID-19 response. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News provocateur, routinely attacks Fauci, often invoking his Catholicism in a demeaning manner. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has initiated arguments with Fauci during Congressional appearances. And Peter Navarro, a former Trump advisor, recently said “Fauci is the father of the actual virus.” (Fauci responded, “How bizarre is that? Think about it for a second. Isn’t that a little weird? I mean, come on.”)
The right-wing animosity towards the well-regarded scientist – who has advised seven presidents, including Trump – has grown in recent days as the theory that COVID-19 “leaked” from a Chinese lab has gained limited traction. Fauci has never outright dismissed the “lab leak” theory, but he thinks it’s unlikely (as do most scientists). Some conservatives point to a tranche of Fauci’s recently released emails to suggest that he helped downplay the idea to protect China. CNN explains:
In one email sent to Fauci last April, an executive at EcoHealth Alliance, the global nonprofit that helped fund some research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, thanked Fauci for publicly stating that scientific evidence supports a natural origin for the coronavirus and not a lab release. (The origins of the virus remain unclear.)
Fauci pointed out that the email was unsolicited and said the idea that he’s covering up for China is “nonsense.” In fact, he said that while animal-to-human transmission is the most likely origin for the pandemic, he’s keeping an “open mind.” He thinks investigations into COVID-19’s beginnings should continue.
Still, on Thursday, Trump released a statement reading, “The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!”
In April, Matthew Dowd, a former GOP operative, told CNN that the attacks on Fauci are consistent with the party’s anti-science streak: “I think this is fundamentally about the attack on science and data, and if it doesn’t agree… with basically their emotional stand, they want to ignore it.”
The vilification of Fauci is a familiar tactic in the GOP playbook dating back to McCarthyism: create caricatures of their perceived enemies. Consider how Hilary Clinton’s limited role in the 2012 Benghazi attack was blown out of proportion or how John Kerry’s war record was distorted when he ran for president in 2004. It’s not enough for Republicans to disagree with their opponents; they must cast them as evil. No surprise then, that a stunningly large chunk of GOP voters think the U.S. is controlled by satan worshipping pedophiles.
To be fair, the instinct to demonize disagreement is not endemic to the GOP. Democrats can be unfair, too. But for career civil servants like Fauci, the trick is avoiding the political noise. “I am so busy trying to do some important things to preserve the health and the safety of the American people that I can’t be bothered with getting distracted with these people that are doing these ad hominems,” Fauci told The Guardian in April.