WASHINGTON — Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci at home in northwest Washington when he answered his cell phone as President Donald Trump yelled at him in an expletive-laden tirade. He had incurred the president’s ire by noting that the vaccines under development may not provide long-lasting immunity.
That was the day, June 3, 2020, “that I first experienced the effects of the president’s anger,” Fauci writes in his upcoming autobiography.
Fauci has long been circumspect in describing his feelings toward Trump. But in the book ‘On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service’ he writes candidly about their relationship, which he describes as ‘complicated’.
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In a chapter titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Fauci described how Trump repeatedly told him he “loved him” while simultaneously berating him with rants filled with four-letter words.
“The president was furious and said I couldn’t keep doing this to him,” Fauci wrote. ‘He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market only rose 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and should have risen 1,000 points, thus costing the country ‘a trillion dollars.’” (The president added an expletive to.)
“I have pretty thick skin,” Fauci added, “but being yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how many times he tells you he loves you, is not fun.”
The book, out Tuesday, traces the history of Fauci’s life, from his childhood in Brooklyn as the son of first-generation Italian Americans (his father was a pharmacist and the family lived above the “Fauci Pharmacy”) to his 54-year career at the National Institutes of Health, including 38 years as director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It’s 450 pages long, and Fauci devotes about 70 of them to the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, when Trump was in power. His criticism of Trump and his White House is sometimes blunt and sometimes oblique, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.
Fauci served under seven presidents and guided the nation through infectious disease threats, including AIDS, swine flu, anthrax and Ebola. But the coronavirus pandemic made him a polarizing public figure and a target of Republicans, especially Trump’s most ardent supporters.
During a tense hearing this month before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci strongly denied Republican accusations that he helped fund research that sparked the pandemic or covered up the possibility that it originated in a laboratory . He called the allegations “absolutely false and downright ridiculous.”
According to Fauci, the Trump White House was unlike any other he had experienced, not least because of its transient relationship with the truth. Trump, he wrote, “shocked me on Day 1 of his presidency, with his disregard for facts like the size of the crowd at his inauguration” and his “aggressive disrespect for the press.”
Those differences extended to the relationship between Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, the chairman of the White House coronavirus response task force.
“Vice presidents,” Fauci wrote, “are almost always publicly loyal to the president. That’s part of the job. But in my opinion, Vice President Pence sometimes overdid it. At task force meetings, he often said some version of, “There are a lot of smart people here, but we all know the smartest person is upstairs.”
Then, without explicitly saying that Pence was referring to Trump, Fauci wrote: “He was, of course, talking about the man who sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.”
Fauci also makes clear that he had little need for some of Trump’s advisers: his chief of staff, Mark Meadows; his chief economic advisor, Peter Navarro; and his medical advisor, Scott Atlas. He said Trump’s aides passed negative stories about him to journalists in 2020.
“The White House’s growing hostility toward me over the spring and summer seemed to at least partially fuel the overt attacks on me by right-wing media and trolls using social media platforms,” Fauci wrote. In August, he opened a letter containing a “fine white powder” and “immediately feared anthrax or worse.” Hazmat teams were called to his office at the National Institutes of Health; a few days later the FBI confirmed that the powder was harmless.
Fauci’s first meeting with Trump came before the coronavirus pandemic, at a ceremony at the White House where the president signed an executive order calling for improvements in the production and distribution of flu vaccines. After the event, Trump noted to Fauci that he had never had a flu shot.
“When I asked him why, he said, ‘Well, I’ve never had the flu. Why did I need a flu shot?’ I did not respond,” Fauci wrote. The implication was clear: The doctor was stunned to discover that Trump knew so little about the purpose of vaccines.
On the morning of January 29, 2020, Fauci wrote, conservative political commentator Lou Dobbs, who had known the doctor for years, called to say Trump wanted to meet with him. Several hours later, Fauci was in the White House Situation Room, briefing the president and his top advisers on a new virus circulating in China. For Fauci, the Brooklyn scientist, it was immediately clear that he and Trump, the president of Queens, could get along as only New Yorkers can.
“He had a New York swagger that I immediately recognized — a confident, underhanded charisma that reminded me of my days in New York,” Fauci wrote.
But that’s where the relationship ended. Fauci wrote that when Trump embraced hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a COVID-19 treatment based on anecdotal evidence, he realized that “sooner or later I would have to publicly refute him.”
He portrayed the president as preoccupied with ratings and the economy; after a coronavirus briefing in March 2020, Trump summoned Fauci to the Oval Office and called Fox News personality Sean Hannity. Fauci recalled the moment: “Hey, Sean,” he said over the loudspeaker. ‘You should see the reviews we have!’”
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