Dr. Anthony Fauci has recalled how Donald Trump reacted to being corrected during a televised press briefing during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.
Fauci said he fully expected to be chewed out by the then-president after he publicly rejected Trump’s claim earlier in the briefing that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine could vanquish COVID.
But after the briefing had finished, the now-presumptive GOP presidential nominee just focused on and boasted to Fauci about the “amazing” ratings the briefings were garnering, Fauci told CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in an interview that aired Tuesday.
“My God, these ratings are amazing. They’re better than cable, they’re better than network,” Trump said, per Fauci, who has also detailed the exchange in his new memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.”
It’s no secret that Trump was “very, very fixated on image and ratings and he thought that the amount of attention that was given to the press briefings was really terrific and his comment was, ‘Wow, did you see those ratings?’” added Fauci. “My feeling was, ‘Ratings? We’re in the middle of a pandemic.’”
Watch the interview here:
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease who served as chief medical adviser to the Biden White House until retiring in 2022, told Gupta why he had to correct Trump’s claim.
“I said to myself, ‘I have a responsibility to preserve my own personal integrity and a responsibility to the American public,’” he explained. “So, when I walked up to the podium, I said, ‘Here he goes.’”
“That was painful to me to have to do that but there was no doubt that I had to do it,” he added. “It wasn’t like, ‘Well, maybe you should, maybe you shouldn’t.’ There was no doubt that I had to do it.”