- Donald Trump and his supporters are attacking the nation’s infectious disease expert, Dr. Fauci, on Twitter with #FireFauci
- The response, #FireTrump is now trending on Twitter
- Donald Trump is creating suspicion around Fauci in a bid to distract from the public health crisis at hand
This weekend, Donald Trump called his infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci into question by re-tweeting the hashtag #FireFauci.
The jab at Dr. Fauci was an apparent response to remarks the Doctor made in a CNN interview. He noted that more lives could have been saved if earlier action had been taken— something Mr. Trump took as a personal affront
It’s very difficult to go back and say that. Obviously you should logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier you could have saved lives. Obviously no one is going to deny that.
Fauci Caught in Trump’s Crosshairs
It’s not quite as obvious as Dr. Fauci believed. His comments angered the President and his supporters, who were quick to jump on the #FireFauci bandwagon.
Notably, Dr. Fauci never directly criticized the President. He even countered the assumption that Donald Trump
should have taken his advice to start social distancing back in February, saying there’s more to it than that.
But what goes into those decisions is complicated. […] If we had right from the very beginning shut everything down it may have been a little bit different but there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
Trump Creates an Enemy
Supporters of Dr. Fauci are hitting back on Twitter with #FireTrump, which has become the second-highest trending hashtag in the US
On April 9, Rush Limbaugh penned a blog titled “
Limbaugh says California only issued lockdowns a few days before New York did— but doesn’t address the stark difference in the timing of those orders. California issued a state-wide shelter in place order when total deaths rose to (on Mach) . The San Francisco Bay Area had already been shut down for two days
In New York, a lockdown came into effect 3 days later. Notably, the death toll at that point had already reached 300.
But Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and the chorus of supporting voices are aiming to discredit Dr. Fauci at any cost because science does not back up their preferred outcome.
#FireFauci critics have pointed to the fact that Fauci himself said the coronavirus risk was relatively low in the US Indeed, during a February press briefing , Fauci did say the outbreak, largely confined to Washington, “remain [ed} at low risk.”
Donald Trump is setting the stage for a scapegoat. He will create a war between himself and whatever fictional enemy will detract from the devastation. This time, the enemy is science, and Mr. Trump’s seeds of mistrust are creating a dangerous precedent in which people learn to believe the President over his own qualified expert advisors.
It allows Trump to give false hope to the stock market
with fictional re-opening dates, promote conspiracy theories, and downplay a public health crisis across the world.
This article was edited by (Samburaj Das)
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