(Samuel Corum, Erin Scott-Pool/Getty Images)
Donald Trump Jr. went after Dr. Anthony Fauci during an interview with Lisa Boothe — condemning him as a “bureaucrat in a lab coat” who “cost lives” due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
After opening the episode by claiming that “every negative news story about President Trump was a lie,” Boothe invited Trump Jr. to further discuss the media’s relationship with his father and his family.
The two discussed the theory that Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology — Trump Jr. condemning the media for dismissing it as a conspiracy while his father was president, only to deem it possible now that he is out of office.
“It’s absolutely insane,” he said on Monday’s The Truth with Lisa Boothe. “And it shows that they always had an objective. The objective was to do whatever they possibly could to hurt Trump, to install their puppets for the leftist cause.”
While the theory has been granted public validity, most scientists still believe the virus originated naturally and was transmitted from animals to humans.
On May 26, President Joe Biden announced that the intelligence community would “redouble” efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, adding that they “coalesced around two likely scenarios.” One theory predicted unintentional transmission between animal and human, while the other involved an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab.
“One thing that gets lost in a lot of these conversations is that the lies from the media have an impact,” Boothe said later in the interview. “I mean, even just looking at the stuff surrounding Covid right? So the media dismissed hydroxychloroquine, there’s a study that just turned out, or that said that it could actually increase survival rates by 200 percent.”
The study, we should note, has not been peer reviewed.
“I mean, the media has blood on their hands. There’s literally no question about that,” Trump Jr. responded. “I mean, they created this in their desperate attempt to try to hurt Trump. They blew off things that probably were right.”
He went on to decry the media’s coverage of Trump as “dangerous” before taking aim at Fauci, claiming he prioritized fame and attention to fighting the pandemic.
“This guy’s not a scientist, he’s a bureaucrat in a lab coat. Nothing more, nothing less. He’s an incompetent. He was in government because he probably couldn’t have made it in the private sector,” Trump Jr. said.
“He wasn’t good enough or smart enough, in my opinion, to do these things. But we gave him unfettered credibility, not based on anything, but based on the fact that he loved TV, he loved cameras, never met a camera he didn’t like, and he’d give them everything they wanted each and every time. I think he cost lives. And the media certainly is complicit in helping him do that.”
Despite Trump Jr’s claim, Fauci’s credibility is based on his position as director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as a physician with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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