Dr. Anthony Fauci, a man who spent decades in the federal government, rising to become the head of the powerful National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the highest-paid employee in the federal government. His wife was in charge of the ethics review board at the NIAID. Fauci, the man who failed both to save us from the HIV/AIDS epidemic as well as the COVID-19 pandemic—was “traumatized” by former President Donald J. Trump.
In what sounds more like Kathy Griffin’s bizarre YouTube rant from 2017 about the forty-fifth president in which she whimpered that “[Trump] broke me”, apparently Fauci was broken by Trump.
Anthony Fauci was “Traumatized”?
According to Biden biographer, Franklin Foer, whose new book, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future (Penguin Press), the powerful medical bureaucrat, Fauci “struggled to contain his exuberance” to be working with the then-newly elected President Joe Biden.
Franklin Foer was given what publishers are describing as “unprecedented” insider access for the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. Part of that access included learning the finer details of Biden’s response to what was then the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Foer discovered through the various insiders he interviewed extensively for the book that Fauci had grown embarrassed at having been made to constantly publicly “correct the [Trump Administration]” in which he had served as NIAID director. (Admittedly, former President Donald J. Trump’s bizarre tirade about possibly injecting bleach-based products into infected-peoples’ bodies was a hugely embarrassing moment in the history of the American presidency).
More astonishingly, though, was the warm welcome and praise that Fauci had received from the forty-sixth president at the outset of his administration. Foer documents how Fauci first met Biden in early 2021, the president insisted that Fauci be seated in the vice president’s chair for the meeting. Biden even ruefully told his aides that Fauci could replace Kamala Harris as Biden’s number two.
Fauci’s outlook on former President Donald Trump is bizarre, though.
The good doctor was given all the resources he had requested from the outset of the pandemic in 2020. Even when Trump started chafing under the various requests that Fauci and his pandemic response team put in, Trump usually gave Fauci everything he needed.
This was something that Fauci himself stated repeatedly in public during the pandemic.
Anthony Fauci “Lied”, Trump Listened, and People Died
In fact, as I first reported in my recent book, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), Fauci went on the American Medical Association’s (AMA) podcast on January 23, 2020, and specifically told worried audiences that, “There’s no chance in the world we could do [lockdowns] to Chicago or New York or San Francisco.”
As the senior infectious disease doctor within the federal government, then-President Trump relied upon Fauci for his advice. So, when Trump inquired with the doctor if NIAID and the federal response needed the power to initiate the lockdowns that became synonymous with Fauci’s time as NIAID director during the pandemic, Fauci said “no.”
Of course, we know that several weeks later, Fauci reversed his opinion, and demanded that the Trump Administration back the lockdowns across the nation. Trump, himself a notorious germophobe, adhered dutifully to Fauci’s recommendations—much to the chagrin of Trump’s biggest supporters … and to the detriment of the entire nation.
The former president was also heavily criticized for continuing to campaign in the 2020 Election, even as the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, spread like wildfire at the raucous public gatherings.
And as for Trump’s decision to keep campaigning during the pandemic, it was Dr. Fauci who initially defended the forty-fifth president in public by explaining on March 9, 2020, that, “If you’re talking about a campaign rally […] in a place where there is no community spread, I think the judgment to have it might be a good judgment.”
Of course, the same people criticizing the former president for campaigning during the pandemic did little to deride the ANTIFA and BLM protesters who caused upwards of $1 billion in property damage across multiple major cities during the summer 2020 George Floyd riots.
Fauci was mum on criticizing the riots in 2020, even as he started to turn against President Trump, who was mostly following Fauci’s advice about the pandemic response from the onset of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Fauci raked in gobs of money over many years via royalties the lab he ran was paid for the various research projects that his lab undertook—at taxpayer expense. As I document in my book, Fauci was so full of himself, having been a senior government scientist since the 1970s, that he even defied former President Barack Obama.
Anthony Fauci & Co., Defied Obama (and Got Away With It)
In 2012, the Obama Administration’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended a stop on all U.S. government-funded gain-of-function tests on coronaviruses that were underway in the United States.
But Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in both the National Institute of Health (NIH) and at his home agency of the NIAID, believed they knew better. They ultimately shifted the risky gain-of-function tests on coronaviruses out of the United States and into the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) via the EcoHealth Alliance, a private non-profit with deep ties to Dr. Shi Zhengli, the so-called “Bat Woman of Wuhan” and head of research on coronaviruses derived from horseshoe bats in China.
Many today believe that the novel coronavirus that emanated from Wuhan, China, was actually a product of the gain-of-function tests that Fauci, et al., were supporting with U.S. tax dollars.
We All Paid for Fauci’s “Trauma”
Lastly, there are the socioeconomic impacts of Fauci’s shambolic COVID response policies. We are in 2023 still dealing with the debilitating impacts of the global supply chain disruptions caused by the very same lockdowns that Fauci insisted former President Trump impose upon us. To some degree, the high costs of fuel are related to supply chain disruptions.
High inflation is the result of the massive amounts of stimulus that both the Trump and Biden Administrations believed they needed to send, in order to help most Americans who lost their income because of the Fauci-supported national lockdowns. As a result of that, the Federal Reserve was compelled to raise interest rates—basically, the Fed passed a hidden tax on the American middle class. All because of Fauci’s policies.
The chutzpah of Dr. Fauci is immense.
For him to assert that he was “traumatized” because he was constantly battling former President Trump and not being listened to is obscene. If anything, Fauci has been rewarded for far too long by having a succession of presidents—Democrats and Republicans alike—listen far too closely to his policy recommendations.
In fact, Franklin Foer asserts that Biden listened so closely to Fauci that he would often disregard the advice of other government scientists until Dr. Fauci could weigh in. And, once Fauci did weigh in, Biden rarely went against him.
Dr. Fauci wasn’t traumatized by anything. We, The People, were all traumatized by Fauci’s policies in the name of disease mitigation (which, by the way, didn’t work). Fauci should be doing cartwheels because, he was not only listened to by multiple presidents on multiple issues, but Fauci was the most handsomely paid government bureaucrat for a long period of time.
In his final years as NIAID director, when COVID-19 hit America, he was venerated in large swaths of the media. Many brick mansions in Bethesda, Maryland, proudly displayed “We Love Fauci” signs in their yards (right next to their “Hate Has No Place Here” and “Biden 2020” yard signs).
Today, Anthony Fauci is well-positioned to reap whatever rewards he can think of. The doctor made bank off a career of receiving cushy royalties for the taxpayer-funded research his government lab conducted. Meanwhile, he’s a mini-celebrity. And he was apparently, for all intents and purposes, the unofficial vice president at the start of the Biden presidency.
Just what, precisely, does this prima donna have to complain about?
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert occasionally serves as a Subject Matter Expert for various organizations, including the Department of Defense. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
