Emails show how the experts tried in vain to warn Trump about COVID-19

The New York Times has published some 80 pages of emails- all on the public record- documenting how the government's and the academic world's top public health experts tried in vain to warn President Trump of the looming threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to be met with smug condescension and apathy from an administration headed by a man who believes that no matter what the subject, he knows better than the experts.

The email thread, entitled "Red Dawn," chronicles the frustration of the people with actual medical degrees and experience in public health with a president who just wouldn't listen. In addition, the Times has published a lengthy investigative piece documenting the times Mr. Trump ignored the warnings and advice of people better informed and far better qualified than he, and how his stubbornness, a lack of planning, and internal infighting in his administration made the current crisis far worse than it had to be.

This stuff is a matter of public record. It's all established and documented fact. Neither of those things, of course, has ever prevented TrumpWorld from rejecting the facts and substituting its own self-serving fantasies. And now, they're doing it again, attempting to avenge the president and themselves upon Dr. Anthony Fauci, the lead expert on the White House task force on COVID-19 who has repeatedly had to correct the president's false and misleading statements and finally committed the greatest sin of all: pointing out that lives were unnecessarily lost because of the nature of the administration's response.

Or lack of it.

As a result, Dr. Fauci has a target on his back. He was a target for the Far-Right already last month. A disinformation campaign on social media is circulating, attempting to make it appear that it's Dr. Fauci who has been consistently wrong and Mr. Trump right. Dr. Fauci is far more popular than the president, and whether he's trying to or not, the mere performance of his job in keeping the American people accurately informed puts him in inevitable conflict with the cause of a president who lives along with his supporters in a fantasy world of wishful thinking. Members of Congress who are as clueless as the president himself are smearing him, and there is growing evidence that Dr. Fauci's truth-telling is being seen in TrumpWorld as a gathering threat. The president even re-tweeted an item criticizing Dr. Fauci with the hashtag #FireFauci, which is being commonly used by the armchair epidemiologists and avid fantasists of the authoritarian pseudo-conservative movement which forms the backbone of the president's support.

But a day of reckoning is coming in November, and I don't think the American people are going to buy it. Mr. Trump's mismanagement of the COVID crisis will be the last nail in his political coffin, and the misguided attempt to substitute Dr. Fauci for Donald Trump as the fall guy just isn't going to work.