Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is launching an all-out attack on fellow Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
This week, his campaign fired back at barbs that Trump has hurled toward DeSantis over the COVID-19 pandemic. The official Twitter account of the DeSantis War Room criticized Trump for not firing Dr. Anthony Fauci as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The campaign shared a campaign video on Twitter, writing:
“Donald Trump became a household name by firing countless people *on television*. But when it came to Fauci…”
Scenes from Trump’s “The Apprentice” TV show were put in the DeSantis campaign video, with the former president repeating the line that made him famous on that show – “you’re fired.”
It then cuts to Trump when he was president, talking about how he can’t fire Fauci while the pandemic lockdowns were going on.
During the height of the pandemic, Fauci was one of the leading voices representing the Trump administration and its handling of the pandemic and the lockdowns that were instituted across the country.
The DeSantis campaign video shows Trump speaking during one of the daily pandemic press briefings that Trump held in 2020. Trump is seen saying:
“Today, I walk in, I hear I’m going to fire him. I’m not firing him. I think he’s a wonderful guy.”
The video then includes other interviews Trump gave where he said he didn’t fire Fauci because of “a firestorm on the left” and that he wasn’t “allowed to” fire Fauci, even after Trump admitted that the doctor was a major issue.
In one clip, Trump says of Fauci:
“Every time he goes on television, there’s a bomb, but there’s even a bigger bomb if you fire him.
And another one:
“Frankly, you can’t win that one; if I would have done it, I would have taken heat.”
Fauci remained in his leadership role with the NIAID for the remainder of the Trump administration, which gave him a continuous national platform to talk about his ultra-liberal approach to handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Democratic President Joe Biden took office, Fauci was named his chief medical advisor. But, he eventually stepped down from his post just a few days before the GOP was set to take the majority of the House earlier this year.
Many Republicans have railed against Fauci and the policies that he and many liberals instituted during the pandemic. The conservatives say that many of those policies were not necessary and ended up setting our country and the economy back years.
Many of the economic hardships the country is dealing with today, they say, are due to some of the things Fauci did under the Trump administration.
DeSantis has been particularly critical of Fauci in the past. During a campaign speech he gave during the 2022 midterms when he was running for re-election as governor of Florida, DeSantis said of Fauci:
“I’m just sick of seeing him. I know he says he’s going to retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
