Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes of Morning Joe and the Rachel Maddow Show ad-free. Plus ad-free listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series, Ultra, Bagman, and Deja News. And now, all MSNBC original podcasts are available ad-free and with bonus content, including How to Win 2024, Prosecuting Donald Trump, Why Is This Happening, and more. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts
So have you watched The Sopranos? If not, hit pause and just go watch all seasons and then come back in a couple of weeks and start this again. The first season of The Sopranos is 13 episodes long. The Sopranos obviously is one of the greatest achievements ever in American drama, certainly in contention for one of the greatest television shows ever made in any country on any subject.
But in season one of The Sopranos, you have to get through like half the whole season. I think you have to get to the seventh episode or something before you get anything that seems like it is a backstory on your lead character. So, I mean, here's a story about a man in therapy. Yes, he's a gangster, but he's a man in therapy. So you think right from the very start of the very first episode, you're going to get
you know, therapy speak. Tell me about your childhood. But it's not until seven episodes into it that we finally get a glimpse of Tony Soprano as a little kid. In that scene, here's young Tony. His uncle comes looking for Tony's dad. Tony's dad hops in a car and takes off with the uncle. Tony himself, the kid, ends up missing the school bus. And while he is not at school, he ends up finding his dad and his uncle and seeing what they were up to.
basically sneaks up on them. And what he sees is his dad and his uncle just beating the bejesus out of this guy on a street corner. And this happens in episode seven.
Then it's two more seasons. You're all the way into season three of the whole series when you get another flashback to Tony as a little kid with his dad. And this time, once again, young Tony is not supposed to be there. He has snuck in. His dad doesn't know he's there. But his dad goes to collect from a local butcher.
And the dad not only beats the living daylights out of the butcher, he takes a meat cleaver to the guy. It is absolutely horrible. It is impossible to watch. And young Tony, young Tony Soprano, the kid, he sees it. And yes, The Sopranos is a gangster TV show. And so, of course, there's going to be violence. But it's also a really, really, really good gangster TV show. And so it's never that simple.
In The Sopranos, we get these flashbacks to give us backstory on our main character, but also basically to understand what's wrong with Tony Soprano. Because, of course, he idolized his father. We learn soon that he inherited his own position in the mafia from his father and then built on that position to become a boss himself. But then as an adult, as a big, tough James Gandolfini mob boss, as our hero slash antihero of the series, our lead character, Tony also becomes
faints all the time. He has panic attacks and he has done this, this most un-gangsterly thing and put himself in therapy. What is the matter with mob boss Tony Soprano? We romanticize gangsters and the way they live in American life. Tony Soprano romanticizes his father basically as an abstraction, as a gangster.
But a small part of the genius of what David Chase did in The Sopranos is that in these flashbacks, which he makes you wait for and wait for and wait for, ultimately what you get, what young Tony Soprano sees as a kid, what he sees his dad doing is disgusting. It's gross. And it hurts Tony Soprano to see it. It kind of breaks him. What young Tony sees as a kid, what happens in these flashbacks is not romantic. It's not cool. It's not funny.
It's just violence. It's menace. It is unprincipled, unromantic thuggery. It's not, you know, art or sport or anything noble or anything with any elegance to it. It's just a mess. It's gross. And as the series unspools, you come to learn in a sort of complex way that this is part of why Tony Soprano is the sad, sick bastard that he is. And it's also why he is doomed as a character.
Gangster-themed TV and movie violence is something that we are very good at in this country. And we all know all the tropes, right? You know, making business people pay protection to the mob. And if they don't pay their protection money, then the mob guys beat them up and trash their business and maybe even kill them. The mob guys running the card games and the other gambling rackets where, sure, the odds are against you while you're playing, but the odds are you're going to get yourself killed if you actually get in debt to them.
and extortion and stealing and prostitution and drug dealing and armed robbery, right? We've all seen it in a million shows. And you can create all sorts of romance and drama around it. And we absolutely do as a country. But when it is done right,
Like in The Sopranos, the irreducibly thuggish, brute, boring violence of it never goes away. And it messes people up in an unsexy, lasting, awful, unromantic way. It makes big, tough, you know, mob bosses built like James Gandolfini straight up faint, which is not cool in so many ways. We're living through an era in our country's political life right now, which is not politics.
And if you want to call it the most romantic possible thing, I think you could call it revolutionary, right? Just like gangsterism is a familiar trope for us in our favorite American drama, we also romanticize revolution and revolutionaries as much as any country on earth. But what we are contending with in our politics right now is a movement that is not doing normal politics and is not competing in normal political terms.
They're trying to end the American system of government. They're trying to bring about a revolution against the American system of government and against the United States of America. And in this story, we're the Americans. So yes, you know, being revolutionary sounds very cool in the abstract, just like, you know, being gangster sounds very cool in the abstract. But in the specific, what they're actually offering is boring because it's just gross force.
It's the end of politics. Let's just let's just do it by force, because physically we mean it just the way we say we were saying it. We mean it just the way you're hearing it. We are we're we're coming for you. Mr. FBI tough guy. Why is he wetting himself? Why is he wet himself on national TV? He's damn scared because he understands the end is near. So, brother, you and all the other people, the torturous these are torturous conversations we're having. Don't torture yourself.
Don't torture yourself. Get your passport. Get the hell out of the country because, hey, we're coming. And guess what, bro? You ain't going to like it one bit. Your crimes and your treason, Comey, all of you. Go ahead. Go to the ends of the earth. We will hunt you down and bring you back. Drive the vermin out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Biden, you and your crime family are nothing but trash. For Joe Biden and Dr. Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, all in the Biden, they're a bunch of feral dogs, right? That's a family of feral dogs. We're going to have to fumigate the lies of Joe Biden, the treason of Joe Biden, and how unfeeble he is.
After that, it's not the tapes. We're coming after Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the senior members of DOJ that have prosecuted President Trump, Jack Smith. That's where you come in. You're the vanguard of this revolution. We're going to do what the Romans did to Carthage. We're going to salt the earth around it so there'll never be another building there again. We're going to rebuild something else. There'll be something that comes up and is rebuilt along the lines that's appropriate. We've got to go back to the beginning.
We've got to go back to Russiagate.
We got to go back to who did that. We got to go back to Mueller's commission. We got to go back to Andrew Weissman and MSNBC and the New York Times and all of it. Right? Every FBI agent, all the CIA, DHS, Chris Wray, all of them. It's going to be a new day. And MAGA will run things. They're going to know that MAGA is not only ascendant, MAGA is in charge. It's very simple. Victory or death.
So this isn't, you know, red meat for the base. This isn't retribution, right? This is retribution as much as Tony Soprano's dad was providing protection to the local butcher. This is not a response to anything. What this is, is just menace and physical threat, right? It's not politics. It's just power. It's just force.
They're just promising violence. That is what they're offering in this election, that this is how we should run the country now. We will hunt you down, and you'll know that we're in power, and we're going to get rid of law enforcement. We're going to salt the earth, and we're just going to hunt you down. I mean, and this is not some random right-wing media guy. This is the man who was the campaign manager for Donald Trump and also the senior White House advisor to the former president, who is now their nominee again.
And it is it's not like he's the only one who's saying this thing. This is what they are offering the American public. And they love it. They're super excited to be getting done with politics, getting right to the force and violence part of it.
The next six months is going to be intense. And we need to strap on our, uh, let's see. What do we want to strap on? We're going to strap on our seatbelt. We're going to put on our helmet or your Carrie Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God. Then maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.
We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all. Don't you think for a second he's not going to unleash hell on all of his political enemies? This is where we are and now we have to finish it. You have to finish it.
Once and for all, they keep saying things like that. Once and for all, finish it, vanquish them. This is not politics. In a political contest, you compete against your fellow citizens with whom you have political disagreements, the rival political party. Whoever loses that fair race concedes, literally concedes, and then they come back. They have the opportunity to come back in the next election cycle and compete against you again.
In real politics, nothing's ever finished. You never take power once and for all. Your enemies are not vanquished, but they are not trying to win a political contest. They are trying to do away with political contests in the United States of America.
which might be why they're not putting much energy into the normal way of competing in this year's political contest. You may have seen this weekend. The former president went to Detroit, which of course seems like a normal thing for a political candidate to do, big city and a big swing state. And he went to a black church trying to appeal to a demographic where he has room to grow. But he goes to this black church in Detroit and his campaign does not take any steps to avoid the pews being completely filled with white people, with white Trump supporters.
Then on the day, the message of his supposed campaign is that he's trying to appeal to black voters. Right. That's the whole point of doing this photo op. He then goes straight from that venue stuffed with white people to a conference hosted by this guy who has been in the news for the last few months for saying, quote, we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.
saying that he thinks black people are not qualified to be airline pilots, that he worries if he's on a flight and sees that the pilot is black, who has been posting things like, quote, whiteness is great on social media, who has been hosting guests on his podcast to talk about how black people are inherently biologically inferior and incapable of advanced intelligence.
Someone who said literally MLK, meaning Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., quote, MLK was awful, not a good person. So on the day your campaign message is, hey, black voters, look at me. Aren't I appealing? Going from the black church that's inexplicably full of white people right to right from there to go be with to go do an appearance with the MLK was awful and the Civil Rights Act was a mistake guy.
If that's how you're running your campaign, you are not trying very hard in normal campaign terms. But they are not trying very hard in normal campaign terms. They're trying. They're not trying very hard to compete on normal political appeals. What they are trying to do instead is take power by menacing and chasing out of the country anyone who opposes their leader. Destroy anyone who contradicts him, let alone anyone who deigns to compete against him.
I mean, if you're done with politics and you just want to be in charge forever by force, then no one can be allowed to contest the leader or to question the leader. Importantly, nobody can be allowed to offer any alternative source of authority to the leader. So there can't be journalists who know stuff and report it. There, of course, can't be opposition politicians. Are you kidding? There can't ever be anyone who runs against him. That would mean taking your life in your hands.
There can't be law enforcement that does anything independent of what the leader wants. The whole government has to work entirely for the leader. There's no government providing information and services like we're used to. There's no state. There's just the deep state, which is terrible and evil and against the leader, and it must be purged, replaced just with people he likes and who do what he wants.
The government cannot have a civil service that has subject matter experts because everybody has to work only for the leader. We should be recommending you to be prosecuted. We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci.
In the Trump era, in the Republican Party, this is what it's like to be the nation's most esteemed public health official, the nation's top subject matter expert on infectious disease. Dr. Anthony Fauci was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease for 38 years.
He has a new book that's out tomorrow. It's called On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. And in that book, he says that in the, quote, early days of the HIV AIDS pandemic, the aggressive hate mail that he got was, quote, homophobically motivated, criticizing me for wasting time trying to save mostly gay men who, quote, brought this all on themselves by their supposedly aberrant behavior.
With Ebola, he says, the hate mail seemed to be related to the perception by white supremacist types that I favored black Africans over the health of our country. So that's the kind of hate mail he got in the AIDS era. That's the kind of hate mail that he got in the Ebola era. But in this era, in response to our most recent infectious disease threat, in the context of the Trump movement on the American political right, now the torrent of hate and threat is
is of a different order and a different magnitude. It needs to be dealt with. The criminal gang leaders, the big heads of the central banks, the Pfizer head, Fauci, all of them that lied to Trump, we know, created the disinfo, already had the vaccine ready years before they released the virus. They all need to go to prison for the rest of their lives. It is the right thing to do that they be executed. I'm not a wimp. I will volunteer. I think it should be public. I will pull the lever.
I will say that I don't have a bloodlust, but I don't want people to do work I wouldn't do. In Dr. Fauci's new book, he tells the story of his decades in public service, serving seven different presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan.
helping lead the response not only to HIV and AIDS domestically and around the globe, but also to Ebola and also Zika and also SARS and also even the anthrax attacks after 9-11. It's a 450-page book. It comes out tomorrow. As I mentioned, it is fascinating. Every new crisis is a detective story and a science thriller and a political potboiler all rolled into one. But the last 100 pages or so are about the COVID crisis.
And also about serving, trying to handle the COVID crisis under the most recent Republican president, under Donald Trump. And even though that part of Dr. Fauci's career in public service is over, he retired in 2022 after serving as President Biden's chief medical advisor.
Even though he is now out of public service after all of these decades, the Trump movement and its members in Congress and its supporters in the media are still going after Dr. Fauci as aggressively as ever, if not more so, even two years after he left government, because he epitomizes one of the things they are trying to destroy. One of the things that they need to destroy in their revolutionary war against the American system of government. It is not that they disagree with him.
It is not that they misunderstand. It is that he represents expertise, authority earned by expertise. The way we use the way we sort of shorthand that in life is that he's a person who knows what he's talking about. And that, of course, is toxic for their political project. That cannot be allowed to stand. And so he is still in the bullseye for them even now.
And I would love to see the book thrown out. I'd love to see him put in jail. I'd love to see him financially suffered. You say he lied to Congress and should be arrested. Isn't that going a little far? Well, I don't know that I said he should be arrested, but I like the idea, Stuart. They're still going after him, even now. This is from the book. This is from August of 2020.
He says, quote, I had been absent for work for a few days because I had a benign polyp removed from one of my vocal cords. I was just getting back into the swing of things, happy to be sitting at my desk in my office going through mail that had piled up. It was about 10.30 a.m. when I picked up a letter off of one of the stacks. The envelope bore a Jacksonville, Florida return address. It was typewritten in an unusual font, but otherwise looked like the fan mail that I got every day.
Most of the time, people ask me to sign a baseball card or an index card. Sometimes, occasionally, he says, quote, they told me they hated me. I opened the top of the envelope with a letter opener and took out a single sheet of folded white paper. As I unfolded it, fine white powder shot up from the paper and drifted down onto my face, my tie, my shirt, my hands, my pants, my desk, and my chair.
I instantly feared anthrax or worse. I immediately shouted to my assistant, Kim, do not come into my office. Go get George and Brett, my security detail who were posted down the hall.
They sprinted to the doorway of my office yelling, don't move, stay where you are, don't come out because you will contaminate everything else. Following their instructions, I put the letter and envelope into a plastic bag for forensics. George called the NIH hazmat team who came to my office in their spacesuits. They had me remove all of my clothes, which also went into a plastic bag, and they sprayed me down with chemical foam. I thought, this is insane. There I was standing naked, being sprayed down by guys in spacesuits.
My fate hinged on a call giving me a preliminary analysis of the powder. There were three possibilities: it was a hoax and merely a harmless powder, it was anthrax spores and I would require four weeks of the antibiotic Cipro but would probably survive, or it was ricin and no matter what I did I would be dead in a few days. Ricin, which is formed from the seeds of castor beans, is lethal when inhaled or injected. Christine, Dr. Fauci's wife, and our daughters were terrified that I might die.
Jenny was also furious, which was probably a reflection of her fear and concern for me. Megan and Allie called multiple times asking, Dad, are you all right? Are you all right? They all dreaded that I might say I was starting to feel sick. My own emotions were complicated. I felt like a complete idiot for opening what in retrospect was a suspicious letter. And I was fatalistic about the outcome. My mother died at age 56. My father at 97.
At age 79 myself, I'd lived a long, full, happy life of achievement. My legal papers were in order because they're always in order. As a physician, I've held the hands of many people as they died. I do not fear death, but I was not ready to leave this earth yet. Not by a long shot. I should go without saying that this should not be something that happens in the life of a public servant, of a public health official. But here we are. 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID.
Dr. Fauci's book explains the government's response, the challenge of dealing with a literally novel coronavirus, something new, learning as we go. He also tells the story of trying to build a government response with a president who literally did not understand what was going on in some very fundamental ways, who told him, told Dr. Fauci, for example, that he didn't understand why he would get a flu shot if he did not have the flu.
as if he did not understand the difference between a treatment and a vaccine. A president who asked why the flu vaccine couldn't just be used to prevent COVID, as if he didn't understand that diseases and viruses are different from one another. A president who believed a Fox News host, Laura Ingraham, when she told him that there was a secret miracle cure for COVID,
A president who didn't understand how clinical studies disproving that had any more validity than what had been heard on the grapevine from someone he saw on the Fox News who had no subject matter expertise. And it got worse from there.
This is also from Dr. Fauci's book. Quote, On April 22nd, I attended a task force meeting where we were briefed by William N. Bryan, acting undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. Bryan explained two studies that showed how sunlight and humidity could kill the virus and substances such as isopropyl alcohol and disinfectants could be used effectively to clean non-porous surfaces.
The following day, he briefed the president in the Oval Office on these studies. Without Deborah Birx or me being present, he then joined the president on the podium in the briefing room. The result was the infamous press conference where Donald Trump appeared to endorse using bleach as a way to disinfect the lungs from COVID.
The president told the White House press corps, quote, Then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see, it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. Dr. Fauci says, I was not at that day's press briefing, but as I watched it on TV, I thought, oh, my God.
Poor Deb, meaning Deborah Birx, being on stage with the president during that musing. She must have been horrified. And given her military background, it would have been difficult for her to contradict the commander in chief, especially publicly. She looked as if she wanted to be any place other in the world but there.
Sitting in front of the television, I knew we were going to have people who heard that from the president and would then go ahead and try it. My phone immediately exploded with texts and calls asking me to comment. I instantly realized that I and other scientists had to counter this message to keep Americans from ingesting bleach, which could literally kill them. Dr. Anthony Fauci is in the bullseye of the Trump movement to this day as they seek to return to power.
He's in the bullseye of the Trump movement, even after leaving the government. And it is not because of COVID. And it is not because of the controversial and difficult decisions of this most recent epidemic threat that he helped the country face down. He has faced down plenty of those in his 54 years at NIH. What he's facing now is a political movement that cannot abide public health expertise at all, because it cannot abide expertise at all, because that competes with
with the truths that are spouted from the head of the leader. It is a movement that cannot abide authority and expertise from anyone other than their leader. And they answer any such competition for him with menace. And it's not romantic, and it may be revolutionary, but there's nothing sexy or dramatic or lovely about it. It is boring, it is violent, and it's about using force.
And it's a war against the U.S. system of government. Dr. Anthony Fauci is an accomplished and brave public servant. He should not have to be as brave as he is, but he is. And he joins us live here next.
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. I have an obligation to find a way of telling this story that is fresh, that has angles that haven't been used in the course of the day, to bring my experience working in the Senate, working in journalism, to try to make sense of what has happened and help you make sense of what it means to you. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.
Joining us now for the interview is Dr. Anthony Fauci. He was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease for 38 years until his retirement from government service just 18 months ago. He has a new book out, which is titled On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. Dr. Fauci joins us now for his first live interview ahead of the book's publication tomorrow. Dr. Fauci, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Um, I feel like I've been counting on you a lot of my life to explain things. Um,
And I feel like one of the things that I'm sort of counting on you for now is bearing a lot of slings and arrows that you don't deserve.
And so I wanted to give you a chance. I set up this interview with some strong words about the way that you've been targeted. I just wanted to give you a chance to brush me back if you think that was inappropriate or if any of that was wrong. No, I think you're right. I mean, that's the thing that I experienced most recently at the congressional hearing, where the purpose of the hearing was to—the stated purpose of the hearing—
was to figure out how we can do better, learn by our mistakes and be better prepared for the inevitability of the next pandemic. And it was complete vitriol and ad hominem. I mean, there was nothing that even resembled that. And to me, that's the thing that scares me, because I think when you go down that road, I personally think and I say it in the book that.
that I think that will, you know, undermine our social order and undermine the fabric of our democracy. Even though it's in a health issue with me, it's in other issues for other people. So that worries me more than the attacks on me. I have to say that quite honestly, that my family and I, we worry more about what's going to happen to the country than the threat on me.
In terms of the kinds of criticism that you're getting, and I know over your long career, you've had a lot of different criticism from a lot of different people. Full disclosure, I was a member of ACT UP, a member of an AIDS activist movement that gave you a really hard time in the height of the AIDS epidemic. And you talk about that in the book, about being stung by the vitriol and the tone and the tactics of some of the ways that we criticized you, but also recognizing that
when that criticism was substantively warranted and when it should change your course. I thought that was a sort of model of humility, itself a sort of model of how to be a responsible public servant. But I wonder if you've reflected at all about the difference between that kind of vitriolic, very aggressive criticism and what you've experienced in the COVID era. It's an enormous difference. I mean, you couldn't imagine anything more different because back in the mid to late 80s,
What the mostly gay activists, young gay men, were doing is that they were trying to get our attention that they needed to be part of the process of discussing the rigidity of the clinical trial, the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the extraordinary amount of time, understandably, that the FDA took to approve a drug without any basis at all for getting drugs to people who needed a compassionate use for it.
They wanted us to say, sit down with us and we'll tell you how we can make this work. The scientific community, myself included at the time, and the regulatory community, they said something which was understandable but completely unacceptable in retrospect. Like, we know better what's for you than what you know for you. So when they heard that, that's when they started to be very iconoclastic, demonstrative, theatrical, and disruptive.
The scientific community pulled back from that even more.
Probably one of the best things I've ever done in my career was I just started listening. I took away the theatrics, took away the iconoclastic behavior and listened to what they were saying. And what they were saying was making absolutely perfect sense. So I kind of describe it now to people. I use the John Lewis when he said, that's trouble, but it's good trouble. They were making good trouble for me. And when I started listening to them,
We were on the same track. Fast forward 40 years and you have a situation where it's pure ad hominem. It's not like let's talk about something, how we can make the world a better place or make the country. It's nothing at all. It's just tearing people down. So when people show a sign of
of an anti-Fauci in 1984, 85 and an anti-Fauci in 2000, you know, 2022. You know, it's like marbles and watermelons difference. It's very, very different. Well, in one case, they're asking you to do something different in the government response to HIV and AIDS. And then the other one, they want to kill you or they want to lock you up or they want to punish you and put your, as Steve Bannon said, put your head on a pike.
In the fragmented information environment that we're in now, and this is one of the things you sort of land on at the very end of the book, this worry that it's not like misinformation and disinformation are new, but in the media environment that we're in right now, it can be so fast and it can so swamp factually grounded information.
I want to give you an opportunity right now to respond in the cogent way that I know you can to the claims that have been made against you by the Trump movement and by the kinds of...
members of Congress who were shouting at you the other day in that hearing. They have accused you of creating the COVID vaccine. They have accused you of covering up the real story that the virus was essentially deliberately or at least accidentally created. Could you respond to those claims? Yeah, well, they're preposterous because if we don't know what the origin of this virus is, they're either somehow
Came out of a lab where where Chinese scientists went into the environment and got infected and played with it and came out. Or it was a natural spillover from an animal to a human in the Wuhan market. I keep a completely open mind. The virological evidence, the epidemiological evidence by most scientists.
qualified virologists strongly favor, though not definitively, strongly favor that it is a natural occurrence. But since it isn't definitive, I keep an open mind. What they say that's incorrect is that the NIH funded a grant in China, an indirect grant funded by a firm in New York that did a subaward to
to do some surveillance studies on what is out there, which is a perfectly appropriate thing to do. In fact, I would probably be held as being incompetent if we didn't do that. As it turns out, the viruses that were being studied under the NIH grant are evolutionarily, or we say phylogenetically, a big word, so distant from SARS-CoV-2
that there's no chance in the world that somebody could make that virus turn into SARS-CoV-2. So this attack that you funded a project that turned into COVID is completely preposterous. And anybody that knows anything about virology will say,
that it's so distant that the precursor virus could not possibly turn in even if you try. So you mean looking at it molecularly, this virus under study, in terms of NIH having any involvement, is so dissimilar to the virus that caused the pandemic that there's no chance they're molecularly related? Even if you tried. Even if you tried to do it. But that still doesn't rule out the possibility that somewhere in China,
out of a lab came the virus. That's why I all say over and over again, even though the evidence strongly weighs towards it being a natural occurrence, I keep an open mind that we still don't know what the origin is. I have so much more to ask you. Can you stay? I will. Dr. Anthony Fauci is our guest. We'll be right back.
A new election matchup with new energy surrounding the race. There is an electricity on the ground. Join your favorite MSNBC hosts at our premiere live audience event to break down all that's at stake in this historic election. The election of 2024 was always going to be a big,
freaking deal. MSNBC Live Democracy 2024 Saturday, September 7th in Brooklyn, New York. Visit msnbc.com slash democracy 2024 to buy your tickets today. Today's news requires more facts, more context and more analysis. The world's never been harder to understand. That's why it's never been more important to try. MSNBC. Understand more.
We're back with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose book comes out tomorrow. This is an incident that happened three days before the 2020 presidential election. Dr. Fauci says, quote, By this time, the virus had infected more than 9 million Americans and killed 230,000. New daily cases were hitting record highs. But out on the campaign trail, Donald Trump insisted, quote, We're turning the corner. We're turning the corner. We're rounding the curve. We will vanquish the virus.
The president said to me during the phone call that day, quote, everybody wants me to fire you, but I'm not going to fire you. You have too illustrious a career, but you have to be positive. The country cannot stay locked down. You have got to give them hope, he went on. Quote, I like you, but so many people, not only in the White House, but throughout the country, hate you because of what you were doing.
And then the president continues, quote, I'm going to win this effing election by a landslide. Just wait and see. I always did things my way and I always win no matter what all these other effing people think. And that effer Biden, he is so effing stupid. I'm going to kick his effing in this election. Dr. Fauci getting that call a few days before the election where he did not win. Yeah.
I know that by this point you'd had quite a lot of interaction with President Trump, but it does seem like that interaction unnerved you a little bit. You know, it did. It almost as if he was talking past me, like he was just emoting. Yeah. It wasn't like he was, because it was a little incongruous, because he ended it by saying, take care, see you soon, something like that. It was like, I wasn't quite sure. It was unnerving. I mean...
Even though you're convinced you're doing the right thing, which which I had been, you know, trying to say all along, just level with the American public. You'll wind up, you know, being better off to do that.
It is not a pleasant thing to have the president of the United States when you have such a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States, for the president to get on the phone and scream at you the way he did. So that was very tough. You describe something that I had I had understood sort of in a pointillist way, but I'd never understood it kind of as a pattern before, which was his continued references to the flu. It did seem the way the way that you described it, that President Trump
didn't understand some of the basics about the flu and that it's a different virus than COVID. He said to you that he didn't see why he would have to get a flu shot if he didn't have the flu. He didn't understand that it was preventative and not treatment. That's true. He also said at NIH, why can't we just use the flu vaccine to prevent COVID? Right. Do you think he does not know what a vaccine is? I think now he, you know, after all of the things we've told him,
The thing that I think underlies this, Rachel, is that he he wanted it so much to be like the flu, because historically the flu peaks and it goes away in March.
April is gone and then you could go on with the election cycle. It has a season. But it wasn't doing that. It wasn't going away. So he kept on saying it's going to disappear like magic. And that's when I had to start saying, no, I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen. And I had to do that publicly. And then when that didn't work.
He started invoking magical cures like hydroxychloroquine, you know, and then when it became clear that wasn't working, he brought in Scott Atlas, who told him everything he wanted to hear. And it was just...
wanting so much for it to go away and figuring out if it wasn't going to go away naturally, I'm going to act like it's going to go away. That was the problem. Was it dangerous for him to promote hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and those other cures, well, supposed cures that don't actually treat COVID? Yeah, I mean, obviously it is. I mean, I don't want to get into how many numbers of people would have made the difference, but clearly he missed an opportunity because there were people out there who knew nothing about this virus.
who were saying hydroxychloroquine works. And we know that not only does it not, but it actually hurts people. He could have used the bully pulpit of the presidency to say, hey, listen to the scientists. But he didn't do that.
In terms of the vaccine development that did happen in this country that you described as being almost miraculous in terms of the pace going from, in 11 months, from the identification of the pathogen to a safe and effective and deployable virus. Obviously, that's something that the United States of America contributed to the world's response and has a lot to be proud of, and you have a lot to be proud of. I don't know if it's okay for me to ask you this, but
If there had been a problem in developing a vaccine for COVID, if we hadn't been able to do that, do you have in mind a number about how many people would have died? I think globally it would be many more millions. In the United States, it could probably be another million because it was very, very clear when you looked at the curves of hospitalizations and deaths in people who were vaccinated.
Versus people who unvaccinated the unvaccinated people, the death and the and the hospitalization went this way and vaccinated. It was low like this. So the difference, the multifold difference in hospitalizations and death, if we did not, if we had a vaccine in the usual time that it takes to get a vaccine, this would have been an even more unimaginable situation.
devastating devastation that we would have gone through. Even more unimaginable. It's already unimaginable. 1.2 million is already just horrible. It would have been much worse. I have one other matter that I want to ask you about. I know I'm not supposed to keep you, but I'm going to if you don't mind. Please do. We'll be right back with Dr. Anthony Fauci right after this.
We're back now again with Dr. Anthony Fauci. His new memoir comes out tomorrow. It's called On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. It's a really good read. It's also an impressive history of somebody who's been there for all of it for the past decades. Seven presidents.
Dr. Fauci, when I was in the AIDS movement, one of the things that really affected my life was that people who were HIV positive became HIV denialists. And people decided that HIV didn't cause AIDS and that if they were sick, it was the anti-HIV drugs, anti-retroviral drugs that were the things that were really making them sick. And they should instead take a natural course. And I
I'd lost a lot of I had friends die because of that. And it was I never knew what to do about it. Now, I feel like we've got a national sickness that sort of feels like it has echoes of that on COVID. Do you see parallels there? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the AIDS denialists not only would had people in the United States die because of that, but in South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, used the AIDS denialists to.
to as an excuse not to have drugs for the people in South Africa and was estimated that over 300,000 South Africans died because they were withheld drugs because of AIDS denialism. I think if you fast forward now about denying the science of a vaccine and denying that vaccines are safe and effective when you have billions of people who've been vaccinated and the data indicates
showing the life-saving elements of a vaccine, that is tantamount to denialism. And when people don't get vaccinated...
because of whatever ideological reason they have for not getting vaccinated. Those are lives lost that are avoidable deaths. And there's been some modeling studies to show that there have been a substantial number of people that would have been alive had they gotten vaccinated. They didn't get vaccinated merely because ideologically they didn't think you should get vaccinated. They believe people who said vaccines don't work and vaccines are dangerous are
And many of those people are dead now, and that's really unfortunate. No matter what their political slant is, that pains me to see people having died because of a decision based on a political reason.
Well, Dr. Fauci, with your work, I mean, even on AIDS alone, just far alone, your work has been attributed for saving 25 million lives. And that's where you start counting before you get to COVID and everything else. Thank you for your service. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His new memoir is called On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. Comes out tomorrow. I'll be right back.
One last thing before we go tonight. I have this new podcast. It's called Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra. It's season two of Ultra. And episode two of that is out today. It starts with a really cheery little episode, I guess. A really cheery little thumbnail sketch of a doomsday weapon designed to kill everyone on earth. So, you know, how's that for a tease?
Episode two of Ultra is out today, wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you take a listen. Thank you. All right, that's going to do it for us tonight.
And now, all MSNBC original podcasts are available ad-free and with bonus content, including How to Win 2024, Prosecuting Donald Trump, Why Is This Happening, and more. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.
