Trump Trashes Fauci as ‘A Disaster,’ Openly Discusses Firing Him on a Campaign Call

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One night after a 60 Minutes interview in which Dr. Anthony Fauci criticized behavior from the White House during the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump is firing back in a big way.

According to multiple reports, the president thoroughly trashed the infectious disease expert as a “disaster” during a campaign call on Monday.

“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said of health officials, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

The president went on to claim that if he’d listened to Fauci, the U.S. would have 500,000 deaths or more from the coronavirus. He also seemed to be unconcerned about his comments being made public.

“If there’s a reporter on, you can have it just the way I said it, I couldn’t care less,” Trump said, according to Collins.

Trump also openly speculated about firing Fauci, but was concerned about the potential fallout — noting “there’s always a bomb” when Fauci appears on television, but there’s “a bigger bomb if you fire him.”

The president’s new comments are the latest salvo in the feud between him and Fauci. On Sunday night, Fauci told 60 Minutes that he was not surprised Trump contracted Covid-19 following the Rose Garden event to introduce Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee.

“I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask,” Fauci said. “When I saw that on TV, I said, ‘Oh my goodness. Nothing good can come out of that, that’s gotta be a problem.’ And then sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event.”