Recently, the Trump administration has turned towards trying to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who has helped lead the push to have the federal government pay attention to the science at hand when developing its response to the Coronavirus. That science has sometimes conflicted with the political campaign message of Trump and his allies, so they’ve lashed out. This week, the anti-Trump Republican group known as The Lincoln Project rolled out a new video ad in which they defend Fauci against the attacks from the president’s team and harshly condemn the president and his allies for their belligerent affronts against science.
The video recounts some of Fauci’s history. He has worked in public health under six presidents, including Trump, and his experience includes work to combat HIV-AIDS. Throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, Fauci has consistently been honest with the American public, a narrator in the ad notes, citing one occasion on which he bluntly acknowledged to Congress that the situation in the U.S. would get worse. Trump, meanwhile, has consistently lied, suggesting, for instance, that the virus would simply disappear, which it has not done and there’s been no evidence that it will ever do.
In the ad, the narrator says:
‘So who do you trust? Donald, the dope? Or the doctor? To protect our families, on November 3rd, we can make Donald Trump disappear. It’s not a miracle. It’s democracy.’
Check out the ad below:
You can trust Dr. Fauci. We can't trust Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/EdsvnxsPhR
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 15, 2020
It’s the latest in a long string of ads that The Lincoln Project has produced going after Trump. They’ve highlighted the Coronavirus pandemic before in contexts like an ad that they produced called “Mourning In America,” which spotlighted the devastating tolls of the pandemic, exacerbated by Trump’s brazenly incompetent leadership. By just about any metric, Trump’s response to the Coronavirus has been a failure. As of early Wednesday morning, the U.S. was fast approaching a total of 140,000 deaths, according to one tally.
Trump keeps refusing to take the situation seriously. The other day, he absurdly claimed that “when you test, you create cases,” which is 1000% incorrect. The cases would still exist and be relevant even if they weren’t confirmed via testing, because people would still be getting sick and dying.
Trump: "We test more than anybody by far and when you test, you create cases. So we've created cases. I can tell you some countries, they test when somebody walks into a hospital sick or … a doctor's office … That's the testing they do so they don't have cases whereas we do."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 13, 2020
Check out Twitter’s response to The Lincoln Project below:
