Critics of my post on President Trump’s responsibility for the Covid-19 response in 2020 have gotten hung up on the idea that I’m saying that he should have fired Fauci back then. And many of the Twitter comments note that if Trump had fired Fauci, the political blowback would have been intense.
My point, though, was that Trump had enormous discretion over Fauci’s role. There was nothing inevitable about Fauci’s becoming the face of the federal government’s Covid-19 response. The Trump administration chose to make him that face — in part because the CDC leadership was plainly not up to the task. Already by the summer of 2020, I was arguing that Fauci’s expanded role was not serving the public well and that the administration should be pulling back on his media appearances.
No doubt this advice, if taken, would have led to criticism that Trump was gagging or hamstringing Fauci. But Trump was willing to take a lot of heat over his decisions, and in any case getting criticized is part of the job. Whatever the political constraints, Trump’s approach of attacking him five days of every week and praising him on two was not what the country needed of the presidency. It also didn’t work out for him politically, as his chaotic response to Covid-19 was a principal reason he lost in 2020.