Trump: 'I Inherited Fauci,' 'I've Never Been a Big Fan'

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump said that he watched the entirety of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday, and noted that he often disagreed with Fauci and was “never a big fan” of his. Trump weighed in on the hearing, in which Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during the course of the hearing despite having a pardon from former President Joe Biden, hours after it occurred while speaking with the press in the Oval Office. “Well, I watched the whole thing today, but more importantly… I inherited Fauci. He was here from the 1980s, so I had him for a period of time, and I disagreed with him a lot. I would have had to close down the whole country if I listened to him,” Trump said, reflecting on his first term during the coronavirus pandemic. “I went the federalist way, which is basically let the governors decide, and generally speaking, the Republican governors did very well; the Democrat governors did not do very well,” he added. Trump said Fauci “wasn’t a big factor” for him, but was for Biden. “But Fauci wanted to have nobody wearing masks, if you remember, and then everybody had to wear five masks, as many masks as you could get. I mean [he] made a lot of mistakes, and he wasn’t a big factor for me. He was a very big factor for Biden,” he said. “And if you remember, even though we were sort of prime time in terms of that whole disaster of COVID, far fewer people died in the Trump administration than in the Biden administration. We ran it well,” he said. He also touted Operation Warp Speed to get COVID vaccines online. “Operation Warp Speed was talked about as being one of the great success stories anywhere in the world, actually, and we did a good job,” he said. “But many more people died under Biden than died in the Trump administration from COVID. COVID was a disaster, but Fauci did not help.” When Breitbart News followed up, asking later why he thinks Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment so many times when he has a pardon from Biden, Trump said Fauci’s lawyers told him not to. “Well, look, I’ve never been a big fan of Fauci. Why he did that was very simple: His lawyer told him to. I don’t know if he would have been better off not doing it,” he said. “There were a lot of questions that I guess he could have answered, and some maybe he didn’t feel comfortable in answering. But his lawyer told him to do that.”