If your America is so great, again, why does Dr. Anthony Fauci need bodyguards?

Five years ago, as she chaired a nationally televised debate among Republican presidential primary candidates, Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, pressed Donald Trump on his crassness toward women. Why, she began to ask, did he give himself permission to disparage women he didn’t like as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

Trump seemed to blanch as Kelly’s question unfolded, but then held a finger out, to interrupt her. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” he injected. His reply brought an outburst of laughter from a raucous and clearly delighted Republican audience. It was a winning moment, and Trump continued to ride the wave, the next day, by turning his attack upon Kelly, telling CNN: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her whatever.”

The price Trump would pay for this and other outrages would soon become clear. There was no price.

He won the GOP nomination and then gathered just enough votes to become the nation’s 45th president. He also prevailed in a political culture war—not by winning American hearts and minds but by gaining a cult-like hold over Republican hearts and minds. If Trump understood anything better than his critics it was the blind allegiance of his supporters. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he said at an Iowa campaign rally in early 2016.

Inasmuch as Trump’s appeal is visceral, not rational, it makes for a daunting communication challenge. How do you converse with folks who bluntly dismiss unwelcome facts as “fake news” while opening their doors for the dangerous lunacy of groups like the QAnon cluster that promotes the fantasy that Trump is secretly working to round up and execute a vast network of pedophile Democrats and show biz people who drink the blood of captive children? Practically speaking, it’s hard to fashion a conversation—let alone a single message—that might make a difference.

This is why my closing argument—on the eve of the most important U.S. election since our civil war—is not an argument. It’s a question.

To this strange and lethal drama there is an ominous echo of Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who resisted the king’s efforts to consolidate power at the expense of the church. “Will no one rid me of the meddlesome priest?” Henry asked aloud on Christmas Day 1170. Four days later Becket was murdered by knights loyal to the king.

You don’t want to talk about George Floyd, or Black Lives Matter, because you don’t like the suggestion that there’s even such a thing as racism, let alone white privilege. You don’t want to talk about hundreds of immigrant children being put in cages and separated from their parents, because you think it’s ultimately their fault. You don’t need to justify voter disenfranchisement and dark money and partisan judges, because elections have consequences, and your side won. I get it.

So let’s talk about Dr. Fauci. Let’s talk about this American story, and see if it squares with your idea of what our country should aspire to be.

Anthony Fauci was born the day before Christmas in 1940, the son of a pharmacist in Brooklyn. As a kid he would ride his bike on evenings and weekends, delivering orders from his parents’ pharmacy. His grade school teachers were Dominican nuns. He studied pre-med at Holy Cross and graduated first in his class, from Cornell, in 1966. He has worked for the U.S. Public Health Service for a half century, specializing in infectious disease research. Since 1984 he has served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci drew international attention in the 1980s for his research and leadership combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. At the beginning he was a voice in a wilderness: his 1981 paper warning that the disease threatened widespread illness and death unless a viable medical treatment could be found was rejected by the New England Journal of Medicine because one of the reviewers thought it was alarmist.

As Michael Specter reports in a New Yorker profile published last spring—How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor—the HIV/AIDS epidemic defined Fauci both as a brilliant researcher and an admittedly transformed physician and public health advocate. He went from becoming a promising researcher to a revered public servant.

“Americans have come to rely on Fauci’s authoritative presence,” Specter writes. “Perhaps not since the Vietnam era, when Walter Cronkite, the avuncular anchor of the ‘CBS Evening News,’ was routinely described as the most trusted man in America, has the country depended so completely on one person to deliver a daily dose of plain talk. In one national poll, [released in early April] seventy-eight per cent of participants approved of Fauci’s performance. Only seven per cent disapproved.”

Dr. Fauci would rather not have been vindicated. At least not like this. The path he advocated to control the epidemic in the U.S. was a road the president chose not to take. “Trump’s now back in charge,” his son-in-law and top advisor Jared Kushner told Bob Woodward in an April 18th recorded interview. “It’s not the doctors.”

Ultimately, the success of the public health service and epidemiologists like Dr. Fauci can be measured not just by how relatively few Americans die of communicable diseases, but the veritable elimination of deadly contagions like small pox, polio, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, and typhoid. In addition to his crucial work on HIV/AIDS, Dr. Fauci’s leadership is one of the reasons many Americans have either forgotten or never heard of infectious diseases like Zika, Ebola, swine flu and SARS. He is every bit an American icon as John Glenn or Michelle Obama.

As Specter reports in his article, the reverence for Dr. Fauci is genuine, longstanding widespread and bipartisan. Specter reminds us that in 1988, then-President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, told a national television audience that Dr. Fauci was one of his heroes.

Last winter it became increasingly clear that Dr. Fauci and Donald Trump are not on the same page when it comes to how serious the COVID-19 epidemic is and how the nation should respond it. After initially being present at the White House daily briefings on the pandemic, Dr. Fauci was gradually pushed aside, and eventually replaced altogether by a doctor, Scott Atlas, with no experience in infectious diseases nor epidemiology. He had, however, come to the President’s attention because he was a regular guest on Fox News.

The root of the conflict is the inevitable friction between Dr. Fauci and his reputation for candor, and a president notorious for not telling the truth. Trump kept assuring the American people that the virus would “just disappear” one day with the help of warmer weather and hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that Trump promoted and claimed to have taken months before he, himself, became infected. Inevitably, journalists and legislators began to ask Dr. Fauci whether he agreed with the president. He did not and—though not confronting Trump directly—he said so.

“People are tired of Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said. “And yet we keep him. Every time he goes on television there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. But he’s a disaster.”—Donald J. Trump, October 19, 2020, in a call with his campaign staff.

As this year has unfolded, the split between America’s doctor and its reality-suppressing president has gotten ever wider. In the absence of a Trump administration plan to control the spread of the infections, Dr. Fauci’s warnings about the epidemic entering an even deadlier phase as winter approaches are coming true. The New York Times reports, this morning (October 28) that the U.S. logged a record of new cases, half a million, last week. This news arrives just hours after the White House issued a press release taking credit for “ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.”

Whereas Trump has mocked Joe Biden and even White House reporters for wearing masks, Dr. Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control have for months been urging people to socially distance and wear masks in public.

A new study by Vanderbilt University health scientists offers compelling evidence that Tennessee hospitals serving patients in areas without mask mandates are seeing a much higher number of COVID-19 hospitalizations than hospitals in areas where mask requirements are in place.

Dr. Fauci would rather not have been vindicated. At least not like this. The path he advocated to control the epidemic in the U.S. was a road the president chose not to take. “Trump’s now back in charge,” his son-in-law and top advisor Jared Kushner told Bob Woodward in an April 18th recorded interview. “It’s not the doctors.”

The consequences of Trump taking charge will likely be measured in hundreds of thousands of avoidable American deaths. As for those who think that the scale and death toll of the American COVID-19 plague was inevitable, consider that in South Korea COVID-19 deaths per million people is just under 9; for Japan its less than 14, for Canada less than 270, but for the United States—687.96, as of this week.

Aware of Dr. Fauci’s popularity, the president has tried for months to restrict his media appearances and avoid directly criticizing him. But he boiled over in an October 19th phone call with his campaign staff, fully aware that the call was being monitored by reporters.

“People are tired of Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said. “And yet we keep him. Every time he goes on television there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. But he’s a disaster.”

To this strange and lethal drama, there is an ominous echo of Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who resisted the king’s efforts to consolidate power at the expense of the church. “Will no one rid me of the meddlesome priest?” Henry asked aloud on Christmas Day 1170. Four days later Becket was murdered by knights loyal to the king.

Trump may not have knights willing to murder for him. But he does have gun-toting supporters who flaunt their allegiance. Thirteen of them were arrested by the FBI on October 8th as they were plotting to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Governor Whitmer came under intense criticism for an executive order in April imposing gathering and travel restrictions to try to blunt the rise of COVID-19 infections in her state. President Trump encouraged protests against her, including an all-caps tweet to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

I don’t know what the winning argument is for those who think it’s just fine for a president to foment rebellion (if not outright violence) against a legitimately elected governor.

My last question for Trump supporters is more elemental. Dr. Fauci is a medical and public health specialist, not a politician. He was born in the USA to a working family, first in his class, legendary work ethic, assiduously non-partisan, decades-long devotion to serving his country and humanity. If he were your son, or daughter, I want to believe you’d be proud of him and proud of the nation that elevated him to such an important position.

Yet, the president, your president, calls the good doctor an “idiot,” and Trump supporters threaten to hurt him, and his family, only because he is doing what we ask public health specialists to do—be honest with us and give us guidance based on the best available science.

“It’s not good,” Dr. Fauci told an interviewer in July. “I don’t see how society does that. It’s tough. Serious threats against me, against my family … my daughters, my wife — I mean, really? Is this the United States of America?”

This is not the American dream. It’s the American nightmare. And now that that you know what it involves, why would you vote to continue it?

–Tim Connor, 10/28/2020 (photo, Wikimedia Commons)