“People are tired of COVID. I have these huge rallies. People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said during a campaign call from his hotel in Las Vegas.
The president then called Fauci “a disaster” and lamented that he would receive lots of negative press if he fired the public-health expert because he is a “nice guy.”
“Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we’d have 500,000 deaths,” he said, before later adding—baselessly—that it would be 700,000 or 800,000, after a weekend of rallies full of crowds that flouted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines of social distancing and face-mask use. There is no evidence to suggest Fauci, or any other U.S. public-health official associated with the COVID-19 response, would be responsible for the hundreds of thousands of American deaths if in charge.
