When you think Donald Trump can’t go any lower, well, of course he can.
Trump’s advisers spent the weekend undercuting the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, anonymously providing details to various news outlets about statements he had made early in the coronavirus outbreak that they said were inaccurate.
The move to treat Dr. Fauci, who has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, as if he were a warring political rival came as he has grown increasingly vocal in his concerns about the national surge in coronavirus cases, as well as his lack of access to Trump over the past several weeks.
It has been accompanied by more measured public criticism from administration officials, including the president.
And it came just days after the White House called school reopening guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overly restrictive, part of a pattern of the administration trying to sideline recommendations that could slow the reopening of the economy, which Trump views as vital to his flailing re-election effort.
Aides to Trump first released to The Washington Post what the paper called a “lengthy list” of remarks that Dr. Fauci had made about the virus when it was in its early stages.
That list featured several comments from Dr. Fauci that White House aides had privately complained about for months, including one in February in which he minimized the chance of asymptomatic spread and said people did not need to make big changes to their lives.
An official told The Post that several other officials were concerned about how often Dr. Fauci had been wrong.
For example, White House officials pointed to a statement by Dr. Fauci in a Feb. 29 interview that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”
But they omitted a warning he delivered right after.
“Right now the risk is still low, but this could change,” he said in the interview, conducted by NBC News. “When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread.”
In the same interview, Dr. Fauci also warned that the coronavirus could become “a major outbreak.”
The list of statements, laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document, was later released to several news outlets.
It was an extraordinary move for the White House to provide news organizations with such a document about a health official who works for the administration and retains a high level of public trust.
Kathleen Sebelius, who served as secretary of Health and Human Services under former President Barack Obama, said efforts to discredit Fauci and other scientists are “potentially very, very dangerous” as the US and other countries work toward a coronavirus vaccine.
“I think people want to know from the scientists that the vaccine is safe, that it is effective, that it will not do more harm than good,” she said.
“And if the public scientists have been discredited, if the President says ‘don’t believe them, you can’t listen to them, they’re often wrong,’ we have then undermined a national vaccination campaign which is an essential step to bringing this horrible period to an end.”
A poll conducted for The New York Times by Siena College last month showed that 67 percent of Americans trusted Dr. Fauci when it came to the virus; only 26 percent trusted the president.
With the United States leading the world by a large margin in both cases and deaths, Dr. Fauci has grown more outspoken recently in interviews with his concerns about the virus, even as Trump has tried to push for states to reopen faster and has threatened to withhold federal money from school districts if they do not reopen in the fall.
In an interview on a podcast with FiveThirtyEight.com last week, Dr. Fauci said that a few states had the virus under control but that “as a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”
By contrast, Trump has tried to play down the threat almost without interruption while making false claims about how quickly and effectively his administration has responded to it.
White House officials would not speak for the record.
And in a White House where almost everything is treated in terms of how it relates to Trump, staff frustrations with Dr. Fauci have run high for months.
Last week, Trump told Fox News that Dr. Fauci had been wrong about many aspects of the pandemic.
Dr. Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” the president said.
Despite claims early on in the fight against the virus that they enjoyed each other’s company, Trump has long been dismissive of Dr. Fauci in private, according to White House officials, taking note of the amount of time he spent on television and of when the doctor contradicted him during press briefings.
Trump began growing frustrated with Dr. Fauci when he expressed concerns about the efficacy of using hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, to treat people who had the coronavirus.
Trump has continued to evangelize in support of the drug, even after the Food and Drug Administration withdrew an emergency authorization allowing it to be used in coronavirus cases.
The president’s advisers have echoed, and sometimes amplified, Trump’s frustrations.
“Dr. Fauci is not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily — and he admits that — have the whole national interest in mind,” Adm. Brett P. Giroir, an assistant health and human services secretary, said in an interview aired Sunday on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”