Speculation grows about Fauci's future

Anthony Fauci looks to be skating on thin ice with President Trump, despite — or perhaps because of — a growing sense that he is the most trusted expert on the coronavirus crisis.

The White House moved on Monday to squash suggestions that Fauci could be ousted from the president’s task force on the crisis.

And Fauci himself sought to shore up his position during the White House press briefing, when he walked back remarks he had made at the weekend.

During a CNN interview on Sunday, Fauci had suggested that mitigation measures would have been more effective had they been put in place earlier, but that there had been “pushback” against them.

After Trump invited Fauci to the lectern within minutes of beginning Monday’s press briefing, the doctor said that his reference to “pushback” was “the wrong choice of words.”

He also said that Trump “went to the mitigation” the first time he was asked to do so.

The remarks came after ominous signs for Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

On Sunday, Trump had retweeted a message that included the words, “time to #FireFauci.”

Two Republican lawmakers wrote an op-ed for the Washington Examiner on Saturday asserting that Fauci was guilty of “a special degree of tone deafness” in the way he spoke about the economic toll of the lockdown that has affected the nation.