Donald Trump said on Friday he wouldn’t take any blame if Dr. Anthony Fauci faces threats in the future, even though the president has reportedly cut the retired public health official’s government security detail.
“You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you work for government,” Trump told reporters, adding that Fauci “made a lot of money” and could hire his own security.
“I would not take responsibility,” Trump continued when asked how he would feel if Fauci faced any heightened risks.
The president on Thursday reportedly pulled Fauci’s detail, which was provided and paid for by the official’s former agency, the National Institutes of Health, where the doctor led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades.
During his time working with the first Trump administration, Fauci and the president regularly clashed.
The public health official often appeared exasperated at briefings and had to publicly push back against non-scientific claims from the Republican and his inner circle, like Trump’s insistence the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for coronavirus.
By the fall of 2020, Trump was openly musing about sacking Fauci, as rally crowds chanted he should be fired.
At the same time, the Trump campaign ran what Fauci said was an unauthorized campaign ad, where the doctor said his words were taken out of context to appear to unequivocally praise the president’s pandemic response.
As early as 2020, Fauci said he began getting death threats and was the target of ire from Trump supporters.
“They knew where my kids work, where they live. The threats would come directly to my children’s phones, directly to my children’s homes,” he told the New York Times in a 2021 interview.
He added there “was chatter on the internet, people talking to each other, threatening, saying, ‘Hey, we got to get rid of this guy. What are we going to do about him? He’s hurting the president’s chances.’ You know, that kind of right-wing craziness.”
The criticism wasn’t just from strangers though.
Right-wing media figures quickly demonized Fauci, with Fox News anchor Jesse Watters once suggesting a crowd should “ambush” Fauci wth questions and go for a “kill shot.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Trump administration’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote a 2021 book about Fauci, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, accusing him of attempting a “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”
Critics see the move to pull Fauci’s security as part of a larger revenge campaign. On Monday, Trump revoked the security clearance of 51 former intelligence officials who angered him by arguing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal bore the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation.
Other officials, like former national security adviser John Bolton, have also had their protective details stripped.
“Anybody who ever disagrees with Trump has to worry about retribution,” Bolton told The Associated Press. “It’s a pretty long list. I think there are a lot of people who are very worried.”
Fauci was among those the Biden administration pre-emptively pardoned on its way out of office, fearing future retribution from Trump.
“These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions,” Biden said of the decision.
