Did Donald Trump Really Try To Get Dr. Fauci Fired?

Even in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and former President Donald Trump, were not on the same page concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning as early as February and March of 2020, Dr. Fauci and Trump began to openly disagree with one another at press conferences and in separate interviews regarding the status of COVID-19 procedures, per USA Today. The first signs of a serious rift between the pair took place in April 2020, when Dr. Fauci revealed that they could have saved more lives in the beginning of the pandemic if top health officials had not experienced "a lot of pushback about shutting things down," according to USA Today. Later that same night, Trump raised quite a few eyebrows when he retweeted a tweet that proposed firing Dr. Fauci.

Despite distributing lists of mistakes that Dr. Fauci made regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and telling news outlets that the Trump administration was concerned about these mistakes, Trump told "Fox News Sunday" in July 2020 that he enjoyed a great relationship with Dr. Fauci. "Dr. Fauci's made some mistakes," Trump said (via Politico). "He's a little bit of an alarmist. ... I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci."

Almost a year after leaving the White House, Trump is still making headlines for his alleged treatment of Dr. Fauci.

After nearly a year of openly struggling to partner with former President Donald Trump and his administration to contain COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke of how he felt under the new Biden administration during a press briefing at the White House in January 2021. "I can tell you, I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the President," Fauci said during the press briefing, per CNN. "The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is — let the science speak. It is somewhat of a liberating feeling."

On Sunday, during an interview with CBS News, Dr. Francis Collins, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health, admitted that Trump and other Republicans pressured him to promote unproven COVID-19 treatments, like hydroxychloroquine, and, more shockingly, to fire Dr. Fauci. However, as he said during the CBS News interview, Dr. Collins resisted these political pressures at every turn. 

"I have done everything I can to stay out of any kind of political, partisan debates because it is really not a place where medical research belongs," Dr. Collins told CBS News, per CNN. "I was not going to compromise scientific principles to just hold onto the job. ... Can you imagine a circumstance where the director of the NIH, somebody who believes in science, would submit to political pressures and fire the greatest expert in infectious disease that the world has known, just to satisfy political concerns?"