Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former Trump pandemic advisor turned outspoken critic, has found himself in the spotlight again as President Donald Trump takes aim at him despite Fauci having received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden.
Trump remains unforgiving over Fauci’s tell-all memoir, released last year, in which Fauci alleged that Trump frequently berated him with expletive-laden outbursts during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. On Thursday, while speaking with reporters, Trump was asked about his decision to terminate U.S. Secret Service protection for Fauci.
The president quipped that Fauci, who reportedly earned $5 million from his memoir, now has the means to pay for his own security. “When you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off. You can’t have them forever, so I think it’s very standard,” Trump replied. continuing, he said it was “very fair” to question whether Fauci still deserved Secret Service protection more than three years after leaving the White House under Biden. “But you work for government. We took some off other people, too. But you can’t have security detail for the rest of your life because you work for the government,” he explained.
Asked if he would feel responsible if “something were to happen” to Fauci or former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, who also lost his Secret Service protection on Thursday, Trump replied, “No.” He added: “They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security, too.”
In the years after serving under Trump, Dr. Fauci was not afraid to speak his mind. In a chapter of his memoir, “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” the pandemic expert made a sarcastic remark about Trump’s occasional public statements expressing “love” for him, only to later berate him privately. “The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him,” Fauci wrote, the New York Times previously reported. “He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars.’”
“I have a pretty thick skin,” Dr. Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.” Withdrawing Secret Service protection from certain political opponents comes soon after Trump chose Sean Curran, his long-time head of security, to lead the troubled agency.
