Believe it or not, Dr. Anthony Fauci once had a “good relationship” with Donald Trump — and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
On this morning’s episode of The View, Fauci opened up about working with Trump in his early days as POTUS.
“Early on, in the beginning, he is an engaging character,” he told the co-hosts. “We had a certain rapport with each other. I was trying to figure out what it was. I think it’s that [we were] two guys from New York City. He was from Queens, I was from the Bronx. We kind of had that New York, he calls it swagger, with each other that was fine.”
According to Fauci, their dynamic started to switch when Trump started spewing falsities during his COVID-19 press briefings.
“All that was really good in the beginning, until he wished and hoped that the outbreak would disappear because it clearly was getting in the way of both the economy and then as a result of that, into the election cycle,” Fauci said. “So he started to say things that actually were not true.”
The former chief medical advisor said he felt a “responsibility” to his own personal and professional integrity as well as the American people to “contradict” Trump.
“That was very difficult for me to do that,” he admitted.
“Once I did that, then things got really dicey.”
He continued, “I don’t think [Trump] went away from the fact that we did have a good relationship but he was really very upset about the fact that I had to get up and say, ‘No, it’s not gonna disappear like magic. No, hydroxychloroquine does not work.’”
Fauci has since become a target for MAGA Republicans, with politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for his criminal prosecution. Despite the backlash, Fauci insisted that he had done nothing wrong.
“I, quite frankly, don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said on The View. “What are the charges? That you saved millions of lives with the vaccine that you helped develop? Or that you got people to do things that were interventions that made them more safe against a deadly pandemic that killed 1.2 million people?”