Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Saturday criticized former president Trump deferring to Dr. Anthony Fauci while shaping his administration’s response to Covid in the early days of the pandemic.
“A leader must have the confidence to stand all alone if need be,” DeSantis said in a speech for the Utah GOP Convention on Saturday. “And so for us, as I got into office, COVID presented that situation for us because we were in a situation – the third-largest state in the country – one of the highest percentage of elderly, economy based on tourism, which we needed to travel to continue.”
Amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, the Trump administration elevated Fauci to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“So, this situation was an existential threat to our state, but I made the judgment. Leaders take the bull by the horns and make the decisions for themselves. They don’t subcontract out their leadership to health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis bucked the Trump administration’s public-health guidance relatively early on in the pandemic, reopening schools and businesses, and blocking localities from implementing vaccine mandates. However, this past February, Trump accused DeSantis of “trying to rewrite history” on his handling of the pandemic in Florida.
“There are Republican governors that did not close their states; Florida was closed for a long period of time,” Trump said during campaign stops in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
In spring 2020, Fauci and Trump’s approaches to solving the Covid-19 crisis were at odds. As Fauci maintained his support for school and business shutdowns, Trump began questioning whether the economic and social cost of such draconian measures was justified, tweeting, “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
After Trump retweeted a fan’s #FireFauci message, according to Reuters, many speculated that he would remove the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” Trump said in 2021 after Fauci and Birx did more glamorous media appearances with CNN, Fox News noted.
“They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine – putting millions of lives at risk,” he said.
In April 2020, however, the White House clarified Trump would not fire Fauci, with a spokesman assuring: “This media chatter is ridiculous – President Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci. Dr. Fauci has been and remains a trusted adviser to President Trump.”
When Biden replaced Trump, Fauci became the administration’s chief medical adviser to the president. Fauci retired from government last year.
DeSantis told Piers Morgan in an interview last month that he would have handled Covid-19 differently than Trump at a national level.
“I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he got way too big for his britches, and I think he did a lot of damage,” DeSantis said.