Anthony Fauci: The one man Trump can’t afford to fire

The ‘tenacious’ doctor has become a minor celebrity of the coronavirus era, writes Sean O'Grady

‘Seen it all before’: Fauci has served under six presidents (Reuters)

In his official photograph as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony S Fauci MD looks like something out of a typical hospital soap opera. As if from central casting, he wears spectacles, a warm smile and the obligatory white lab coat and brushed aluminium-look name badge. He looks as though you’ve just woken up on a ward and he’s there to tell you the operation was a success, but you’ll have to take things easy for a few days, and now get a little sleep. America must long for the day when he can declare something similar about Covid-19.

He is quite the cult figure these days, Fauci, thanks to his high-profile and sometimes controversial role as, in effect, America’s most senior doctor in the age of coronavirus. His frequent media appearances and up-and-down relationship with the president has spawned minor celebrity status. He must be flattered that Brad Pitt was chosen to play him in Saturday Night Live, and devoted fans of the public health expert can acquire a wide range of unofficial Fauci merch – or perhaps we should call it “merchi” – such as mugs, T-shirts and little bobble-head dolls. A new interview with InStyle, a fashion magazine, has him on the cover, sunny and dapper in his smart casuals, sitting by the pool. They’ve captioned him “The Good Doctor”, despite, or maybe because, America’s deaths from Covid-19 have reached 136,000, with 3.4 million cases and rising.

This gives you a clue as to why Donald Trump cannot fire his sometimes turbulent doctor, even if he was constitutionally allowed to do so. (Technically he is not and Trump would have to ask/make others do it for him.) Trump can, and has, dispensed with chiefs of staff, national security advisers, cabinet secretaries, an FBI director and many others, but the real reason Fauci is unsackable is that he is just too popular and important to ditch, even though Trump has made his displeasure with Fauci well known. With the second wave of coronavirus hammering Texas, Arizona, Florida and California, the nation looks to Fauci, not Trump, for truth and salvation.

While Trump was, until very recently, going around without a mask and organising super-spreader political rallies, Fauci was trying to urge Americans to do the right thing. This was doubly difficult in a federal system where he has little direct authority, and with a virulent strain of individualism: America can’t have a national lock down even if it wanted to, and many do not. It is a remarkably difficult position to be left in.

Here, by the way, is Fauci’s insight into the problem of persuasion: “Our forefathers had the guts to come by boat from Europe or wherever else. That’s the general spirit: you don’t always trust authority”, but now it has become “extreme”: “The foundation of the anti-vaccination movement, that we don’t trust what the government is telling us. That is very, very problematic right now”.

As to his immediate future, according to Fauci himself: “I don’t see my termination within the near future because I judge [my career] by my energy and my effectiveness. And right now with all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective.” It is a rare moment when Fauci shows a bit of ego, the usual style is self-effacement, and the contrast with his current boss is usually very striking.

America’s commander-in-chief and doctor-in-chief do not have much in common. They both come from New York; they are rough contemporaries (surprisingly Fauci is the elder, at 79 against Trump’s 74); all their respective grandparents came from Europe in the late nineteenth century, and made good. And, er, that’s about it. They both, broadly, went into the family business, but Fauci’s was the much more modest of the two, compared with the very wealthy Trumps. Fauci’s family, of Italian and Swiss origins, ran a pharmacy and little Anthony had to get to work too – “I was delivering prescriptions from the time I was old enough to ride a bike”.

Or take their own family lives. Trump is on his third wife, and by all accounts lives a semi-separate life from the First Lady, indeed sometimes literally doesn’t speak the same language as her (Melania’s native Slovenian is used in her quarters with her son and her parents).

By contrast, Fauci has been married to the same woman for the past 35 years, a nurse turned bioethicist he met through work, Christine Grady. They have three daughters: Alison, a Twitter software engineer (and thus part of the machine that keeps Trump’s massive but fragile ego on life support); Jennifer, a psychology fellow; and Megan, a teacher. Trump’s late starts, evening parked in front of Fox News and liking for the golf course are well known; Fauci is and was always a workaholic, working 18- or 19-hour days, subsisting on a big breakfast, skipping lunch (maybe not so healthy), but looking forward to a late (9pm) dinner.

When his kids were growing up Fauci said his "idea of a good time” was “being together with my wife and children, eating fried calamari, drinking a glass of wine and fishing”. Jennifer Fauci says of the eminent immunologist dad that he was a “goofball”, singing opera in the kitchen and larking around. Can’t see Trump doing that.

Before the White House curtailed Fauci’s TV appearances last month, the pair became a familiar sight. Standing side by side at the White House press conferences, Trump seemed to tower over the compact Fauci, but that was a little deceptive. Trump is 6ft 3in, but Fauci stands at 5ft 7in, tall enough to have captained his college basketball team. Apparently he led Regis High, after a run of only one win in 16 games, to a famous victory over the mighty Fordham Prep School back in 1958. A contemporary said that Fauci could “dribble through a brick wall” and a talent scout filed this perceptive report on the young player: “Classic point guard, excellent ball handler, pesky defender. A tenacious competitor in his short shorts and striped socks whose feistiness on the court defied some parts of his personality and effected others.” “Tenacious” is the word that steps off the page there.

While Fauci has a degree in classics (because he “wanted to understand the human species”), and countless qualifications, prizes and honours, Trump paid someone to take his exams for him. Where Fauci has made a career out of trying to find cures and treatments for HIV/Aids, Ebola, Sars, rheumatism and now Covid-19, Trump was in real estate and TV.

When Trump is impetuous and driven to anger by some inconvenient truth about Covid, Fauci is calm and affable, avoiding head-on confrontations with the president, but finding ways through them, like dribbling through a solid mountainous wall of opposing players on the basketball court all over again.

This week, having suffered some astonishingly negative briefing from the White House, Fauci merely dismissed it: “That’s life in the fast lane.” An official presidential list of Fauci’s “mistakes” was produced on 7 July, followed up by a hostile article by one of Trump’s few genuine fellow travellers in the administration, trade secretary Pete Navarro, who says Fauci was “wrong on everything” he interacted with him on. Trump damned Fauci with faint praise – “nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes”.

Yet Fauci has seen it all before, though maybe not a case quite as strange as Donald J Trump. Since his appointment to look after America’s public health in 1984, Fauci has served six presidents – Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton, Obama and now The Donald. Bush senior thought of Fauci as a hero, someone young Americans could look up to; Bush junior awarded Fauci the presidential medal of honour. All respected him, only Trump has derided him. The president in April retweeted a hostile message containing #FireFauci, curbed his media profile, and prevented him from testifying to Congress. The doctor hasn’t briefed Trump since 2 June, even before that “dirt file” of Fauci's “mistakes” was circulated.

There’s no doubt that some of Fauci’s prescriptions have been open to question. Early in the crisis he was upbeat about people going on cruises and wasn’t a huge devotee of the face mask; but on the big issue of lockdown, Fauci has been vindicated, albeit in the most tragic way imaginable. He is not infallible though, like any other expert, and he is a public figure open to criticism. It has been intense, much more so than even in the Aids epidemic when he was attacked for slow progress towards a vaccine (still not discovered). This year that has turned to death threats and, of course, open declarations of scepticism from his president.

Yet Fauci has learned a thing or two about dealing with politicians over his four decades of exposure to their various idiosyncrasies, complexes and syndromes. Fauci will argue back, but only from a distance, indirectly, leaving time to consider his response. He confesses that, for an “apolitical” person such as himself, he has found the presidential cold shoulder “very stressful”, and acknowledged the “real and perceived built-up conflict”.

He does not interrupt or defy the president in person, even when he says something stupid – “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down”. The approach instead is: “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.” Yet he has to speak out when he can, as honestly as he can get away with – “walking a tightrope” as Fauci describes it. He can do no other.

In an election year, in the middle of a pandemic, he knows even Trump can’t casually jettison him, but he doesn’t wish to be sidelined either. Fauci is wise enough to see that Trump would just find another doctor more willing to agree with him, the same as he does with lawyers and political advisers, and, in a way, like he’s done with the World Health Organisation.

It seems the president has given way instead, though maybe for other reasons too. The coronavirus task force wasn’t wound up after all, as once threatened, but handed to Vice President Mike Pence who doesn’t publicly disdain Fauci. Lately, ever unpredictable, Trump has been conciliatory to Fauci, and keen to pass blame for failure on a more electorally expedient culprit: “We’re all in the same team, including Dr Fauci. We want to get rid of this mess that the Chinese sent us, so everybody is working on the same lines, and we’re doing very well.”

Fauci has made himself more secure by just doing his job and offering an honest opinion, still valued by some in America. He has already said that he is worried about the trends, and “I don’t think you can say we’re doing great”, and he is hanging on in there. This tenacious student of six decades ago still has that quality, and it is central to Fauci’s survival and whatever success he has had. In March Fauci explained it: “When you’re dealing with the White House, sometimes you have to say things, one, two, three, four times and then it happens. So I’m going to keep pushing.” You can get that as a slogan on your Fauci coffee mug if you like, if you’re looking for an antidote to despair.