Washington Memo
As the Trump White House attacks the government’s top infectious disease expert, “What’s happening to Dr. Fauci?” has become an urgent topic in Washington and in science and medical circles.
WASHINGTON — For a while there, it looked possible that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci — the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a Washington sacred cow if there ever was one — might come away from the Trump White House unscathed. He was viewed as bipartisan (served six presidents!) and a savvy truth-teller able to skirt the reputational contagions that can accompany prolonged exposure to President Trump.
He dominated March and April as the coronavirus pandemic raged.
But then “Hang Fauci” signs started popping up at “Reopen Now” rallies, and #FireFauci hashtags started trending on Twitter. The president himself retweeted one. And now, well —
“That is a bit bizarre,” Dr. Fauci said this week in describing his current predicament at the White House. He has come under sustained attack, from the Oval Office down, on the record and off, in presidential tweets and in an attack op-ed article in USA Today by Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s top trade adviser, who declared that Dr. Fauci was “wrong about everything.”
(On Wednesday, the newspaper had second thoughts, as Bill Sternberg, the editorial page editor, said the article “did not meet USA Today’s fact-checking standards.”)
“You can trust respected medical authorities,” Dr. Fauci said this week in a virtual forum at Georgetown University, almost plaintively at times. “I believe I’m one of them, so I think you can trust me.”
He urged students to avoid the “waste of time” that can be an occupational hazard for anyone who tries to promote science research and public health in Washington. “Don’t get involved in any of the political nonsense,” he pleaded from the center of exactly that.
These are treacherous times in the sacred cow business.
Dr. Fauci can vanquish pandemics, receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom (awarded by President George W. Bush) and have a talent for killer lab-coat news conferences — and still require a security detail.
“I think it’s outrageous what’s happening to Dr. Fauci, I really do,” said Gov. Larry Hogan, Republican of Maryland, a Trump critic who has worked closely with Dr. Fauci on Maryland’s response to the coronavirus. “I have never seen anything like this in Washington, and I’ve been around a long time.”
“What’s happening to Dr. Fauci” has become an urgent topic around the capital these days, as well as in science and medical circles where he holds a solemn and almost revered status. The matter often gets raised with a level of resignation — or with a hint of surprise that he has survived this long around Mr. Trump.
“On some level, I guess I’m despondent,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor of global health at Harvard Medical School. “I suppose it was inevitable, though. Obviously the pandemic response is going extremely badly, and when things get so bad, people need a scapegoat. But when you’re turning on Tony Fauci, you’re really in big trouble.”
The 45th president has a particular knack for going after figures once considered beyond reproach. Before he was even inaugurated, Mr. Trump went after a whole herd of presumed sacred cows — Representative John Lewis, Meryl Streep, the cast of “Hamilton” and the pope, among others — and lived to tell about it. Not only that, but his supporters seemed especially thrilled by Mr. Trump’s willingness to fight with anyone, no matter how exalted or elite.
Washington in particular has always had a weakness for a few designated figures who enjoyed bipartisan “national treasure” status. Colin L. Powell after the gulf war or John McCain after he ran for president in 2000 or Alan Greenspan before people started blaming him for tanking the economy or Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation (at least until Mr. Trump started attacking his “witch hunt” investigation and many of the president’s supporters followed suit).
Dr. Fauci has burnished his own credentials over more than a half-century in Washington. He packed all the right biographical details and hobbies. He hailed from Brooklyn, was trained by Jesuits (College of the Holy Cross, class of 1962), loved baseball (Go Nats), ran lots of miles and subsisted on only four or five hours of sleep a night and double shots of Illy espresso when he rose at or before dawn.
He checked all the right boxes of a particular kind of Washington icon who could “transcend politics.”
“I have known Tony a long time, and I’ve never heard him identify himself as a Democrat or Republican,” said Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, a former director of the Food and Drug Administration and a onetime assistant to Dr. Fauci. “He has always taken great pride in that he has continued to run a lab and see patients.”
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Dr. Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health in 1968, was hailed for his pioneering AIDS research in the 1980s and was the inspiration for a dashing scientist protagonist in a best-selling 1991 novel, “Happy Endings,” by Sally Quinn, the longtime journalist, hostess and chronicler of Washington’s cultural anthropology.
He was especially adept at throwing himself into desperate situations, running up against prickly personalities and taming them into allies. Larry Kramer, the country’s best-known AIDS activist, would routinely rail against Dr. Fauci in the 1980s for what Mr. Kramer considered to be Dr. Fauci’s slow-walking of potential treatments against the deadly virus.
“How did I meet Larry? He called me a murderer and an incompetent idiot on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner magazine,” Dr. Fauci recalled to The New York Times’s Donald G. McNeil Jr. after Mr. Kramer’s death in May. Mr. Kramer eventually apologized, and the two would go on to forge “an extraordinary 33-year relationship,” Dr. Fauci said. “We loved each other.”
No one doubts Dr. Fauci’s ego, or his skill in cultivating his public image. He is solicitous and responsive to the news media, and displays an impressive gallery of photographs of himself with presidents and other dignitaries in his office at the N.I.H. He joked in a CNN interview that he would like Brad Pitt to play him in a “Saturday Night Live” skit — and then, a few weeks later, there was Brad Pitt playing Dr. Fauci in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
In the early days of the pandemic, Mr. Trump would marvel at how “big” of a celebrity Dr. Fauci had become, as if he were just some obscure science nerd until Mr. Trump discovered him.
Dr. Fauci was ever mindful of managing up. He paid determined deference to the president, whom he would describe as “the boss,” even when he was strenuously recommending actions that ran directly counter to Mr. Trump’s own example — like wearing a mask.
For a while, Dr. Fauci’s avuncular, almost sheepish manner proved sufficiently disarming. Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to him as “a nice guy.”
“He learned how to speak truth to power but to do so in a way that did not threaten these big political egos,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Even in recent days, Dr. Fauci’s defense of himself against the White House attempts to undermine him have landed on the notion that this unseemly melodrama is “hurting the president,” as if Mr. Trump himself were just a passive victim of another random distraction that dropped from the sky.
“I remember hearing Tony talk once about working with all these different presidents,” said Dr. Jha, of Harvard Medical School. “He said that he didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what their angles were.”
“In his own humble way,” Dr. Jha added, “he said, ‘I’m not smart enough to figure out what someone’s angle is.’ And usually that worked out just fine for him.”
