President Donald Trump swung at White House COVID-19 expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday morning after the health official slammed the Trump campaign for misleadingly using his words in an ad without permission and out of context.
“Actually, Tony’s pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications. ‘No problem, no masks,'” Trump tweeted in response to CNN’s report on Fauci’s criticism.
The President seemed to be referring to when Fauci threw out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game in July, which reportedly irritated Trump at the time.
On Sunday, Fauci blasted the Trump campaign’s ad on the President’s COVID-19 response that used a clip of the doctor stating that “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”
“The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials,” Fauci said in a statement.
Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh said that “the words spoken are accurate, and directly from Dr. Fauci’s mouth.”
The full context of the doctor’s comments, which he had made during a Fox News interview in March, was his praise of the White House’s COVID-19 task force as a whole amid the pandemic.
“We’re talking about all hands on deck. I, as one of many people on a team, I’m not the only person. Since the beginning, that we even recognized what this was, I have been devoting almost full time on this. I’m down at the White House virtually every day with the task force. It’s every single day,” Fauci said during the interview. “So I can’t imagine that, under any circumstances, that anybody could be doing more.”
