Donald Trump has some questions about his low approval ratings, and he used Tuesday’s coronavirus press briefing to make them known. In a rant, disguised as an answer to a reporter’s question, the impeached president asked why Dr. Fauci had such a high approval rating, yet nobody likes him.
“Because remember, he’s working for this administration,” Trump said. “We could have gotten other people. We could have gotten somebody else. It didn’t have to be Dr. Fauci.”
Dr. Fauci has been a hugely popular figure since the early stages of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak. In fact, an April poll conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found that far more Americans trusted what the country’s leading infectious disease expert and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said about the health crisis than what Donald Trump was saying.
Though Trump claims that he gets along well with Fauci and he is glad that he has found favor among the public, he also retweeted a post in recent days that alleged the popular doctor “misled the public” on the coronavirus. The two men have often disagreed on the handling of both coronavirus prevention and a cure. While Trump continues to insist that hydroxychloroquine is a suitable treatment for COVID-19, Fauci has countered that argument on several occasions.
When asked about why Trump believes the coronavirus task force member is not being straightforward with the public, Trump insisted, “I don’t even know what his stance is on that,” and resurfaced his talking point about the travel ban directed at China, a decision he claims Dr. Fauci told him helped save “tens of thousands of lives.”
Trump’s undermining of Dr. Fauci and praise of himself and his administration’s handling of the pandemic was evidently a lead up to a grievance he has been holding on to for quite some time.
“So it is curious, a man works for us and yet he’s highly thought of and nobody likes me,” Trump restates, before concluding, “It can only be my personality.”