DeSantis hits Trump for not firing Fauci

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) presidential campaign is criticizing former President Trump for not firing Dr. Anthony Fauci during the coronavirus pandemic, releasing a new video Monday that highlights Trump’s decision to keep Fauci on his team.

The 44-second video spot, which DeSantis’s rapid response team tweeted, shows clips of Trump from his years on NBC’s “The Apprentice” telling contestants “You’re fired.”

It then contrasts that footage with video of Trump explaining why he did not fire Fauci, a key figure in the Trump and Biden administrations who was the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

“Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb,” Trump is heard saying in the DeSantis campaign video. “But there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him.” 

In another clip from the spot, Trump is heard saying “Frankly, you can’t win that one. If I would have done it, I would have taken heat.” 

Fauci became a conservative target as he recommended, along with many other public health officials, lockdowns and social distancing during the pandemic. More than 1 million people died from the coronavirus.

As people tired of the lockdowns, Fauci’s positions grew less and less popular, particularly with conservatives.

Trump suggested ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he would fire Fauci after Election Day, but he did not fire him. 

DeSantis has sought to contrast his handling of the pandemic with Trump’s, seeing it as an area where he can make ground on the former president, who leads GOP polls.

Trump has fired back at DeSantis, pointing to the state’s relatively high number of deaths and its brief lockdown at the outset of the pandemic.

“How about the fact that he had the third-most deaths of any state,” the former president said in a campaign video late last month, adding, “Even [former New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo did better. He was No. 4.”

On Saturday, DeSantis touted Florida’s response to the pandemic, saying the state chose “freedom over Fauci-ism.”

“We held the line when freedom itself hung in the balance,” DeSantis argued during Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) annual Roast and Ride fundraiser in Des Moines. “We refused to let our state descend into some type of Fauci-an dystopia, where people’s livelihoods were ruined and their freedoms were curtailed.”