Erasing Fauci: Trump's petty hatred lingers, like Long COVID

They removed Dr. Fauci's image from an inspirational mural at NIH

Trump’s hatred of Anthony Fauci spread concurrently with the coronavirus and, like Long COVID, it lingers to this day, five years after the start of the pandemic.

According to The Washington Post, a large, colorful image of Fauci (above) that appeared on an inspirational mural at the National Institutes of Health has been removed, a despicable and petty purge of a doctor whose actions saved countless lives, foreign and domestic.

Drawing from the autocrat’s handbook, the second Trump administration is apparently trying to erase memories of the first Trump administration, when the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 400,000 — about a third of the total to date.

Or maybe someone at NIH knows that the image of Fauci would set Trump off should the delicate president ever visit the Bethesda campus.

Trump is the worst possible president to have at any time, but it was an epic misfortune for the nation that he was sitting in the Oval Office when the coronavirus arrived.

It was a confusing and scary period in America, with Trump’s slow response to the outbreak causing unnecessary deaths and large swaths of this politically polarized nation coming to resent and even hate Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases.

The deadly virus was first reported in the U.S. in January 2020. In February, Trump predicted the virus would be gone by April. In March, he declared a national emergency. In April, apparently displeased that the virus was still in circulation, Trump retweeted a "Time to #FireFauci” message on Twitter.

He later called Fauci a “disaster” and said Americans were sick of seeing him and other “idiots” on television.

That last bit — about the amount of air time Fauci received during the pandemic — that’s likely what Trump detested. He was upstaged and outclassed. He resented Fauci for his brains and the respect he had earned over five decades advising presidents of both parties.

Trump hated having to deal with a public health crisis that threatened his re-election in 2020 — what an inconvenience! — and he came to hate the doctor most identified with it.

I’m using the word “hate” here for a reason. Hatred is endemic in the Trump MAGA world, where there’s a belief in the political benefits from hating the elites. It’s not surprising, then, that resentful right-wing critics tried to exploit even minor missteps by Fauci and his peers.

And so, in 2025, it has come to this — erasing Fauci at the prestigious institution where he served his country as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years.

I’ve listened and read criticism of Fauci, in an attempt to understand it. Almost all of the harshest criticism comes from self-declared experts on public health, conspiracy nuts and libertarian conservatives who resented Fauci for calling for masking, for social distancing, and for suggesting that Americans get vaccinated — in other words, a bunch of whiners!

Nobody was happy with any of this. Most of us, while cautious about COVID-19, saw it as a threat mainly to older people and disliked all the inconveniences — working from home, shutting down stores and restaurants, masking and distance learning for school kids, getting the shots.

But most of America went along with this, and most of America survived the pandemic, though the partisanship was stark.

In opinion surveys, a healthy majority of Democrats said consistently that they respected Fauci while the percentage of Republicans who did so fell rapidly.

In that regard, it’s interesting to note that the political divide over Fauci tracked with the nation’s political divide generally, and with COVID-19 mortality. Data suggests that resentment of public health measures caused more Republican deaths than deaths of Democrats.

Researchers from Yale, who studied the pandemic's effects on Florida and Ohio from March 2020 through December 2021, found that "excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults.” The study found that "the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters,” suggesting that vaccine resistance among Republicans was to blame for the difference.

So it figures that Fauci’s reputation was in free fall among Trump supporters. Trump hated him; they did, too.

By October 2020, it looked to the MAGA that Fauci had lined up fully against their man. After Trump tested positive for COVID-19, Fauci went on 60 Minutes and said this: "I was worried that [Trump] was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation — crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask."

Fauci was referring to Trump’s Rose Garden introduction of Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his third nominee to the Supreme Court. "And then sure enough,” said Fauci, “it turned out to be a superspreader event.”

That might have been the last straw for Trump.

Now Fauci’s image from the NIH mural, meant to inspire the new generation of scientists who work or study there, is gone.

For Dr. Stuart Ray, a professor of medicine and director of the division of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the attacks on Fauci serve a sinister purpose: The dismantling of widely-respected sources of wisdom. That’s something also endemic to the Trump MAGA world.

But while they can take Fauci’s picture off a wall, they can’t erase his record of public service. Here, in Ray’s words, are some of Fauci’s many accomplishments:

• Clinical care and research addressing immune-mediated diseases like vasculitis, for which he received accolades starting very early in his career, recollections of which intensify the admiration of people who dig into his past.

• Clinical care and research addressing HIV infection before we knew that name for the virus that causes AIDS, or even before we had a proper name for that disease.

• He was directly involved in research that helped illuminate how HIV damages the immune system.

• He was one of the chief architects of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) – a program, initiated under President George W. Bush, that has saved at least 25 million lives.

• He has tirelessly advocated for clinical care, research and education to manage and prevent HIV infection worldwide.

“His judgment has been trusted,” Ray added, “but that doesn’t mean he’s flawless. Like science, in which we don’t aspire to get it right every time but adhere to a process of continuous learning and discovery, I think he has done the best he could in the moment, balancing complex considerations at every turn. …

“So, I’m dismayed by the systematic effort to erode Tony Fauci’s position of trusted advisor, but I can’t say that I’m surprised given the pattern of behavior of the Trump Party. Destruction of trusted sources is definitely on brand.”