Trump said Fauci is better at pitching a baseball than he is at 'predicting what to do with people's health'

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, throws out the ceremonial first pitch prior to the game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park on July 23, 2020.

Rob Carr/Getty Images

• Trump remains annoyed with Dr. Anthony Fauci even following the end of his presidential term.
• "He is a better baseball pitcher than he is predicting what to do with people's health," Trump said of Fauci.
• Trump also said he believed COVID-19 escaped from a lab on accident.

Former President Donald Trump offered some backhanded criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, in an interview with The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway that was published on Friday.

"He is a better baseball pitcher than he is predicting what to do with people's health," Trump told Hemingway, referring to Fauci's ceremonial opening pitch a Major League Baseball Game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals in July 2020.

Fauci, a longtime National fans, made the first pitch while masked, appearing in a nearly empty Nationals Park stadium. He bungled the pitch, calling it "quite embarrassing" in a February Q&A with the editor-in-chief of JAMA.

-ESPN (@espn) July 23, 2020

"Well, who knew that he knew so little? Anthony Fauci is a good promoter-he's a great promoter," Trump said of the infectious diseases expert, who's been a leading voice on public health amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hemingway, for her part, described Fauci as having "relished his role in advocating lockdowns and other authoritarian responses to the COVID pandemic," while detailing how she herself became infected with the virus.

Trump and Fauci have a history of sparring with one other. Fauci often contradicted the former president's rosy assessments of the state of the pandemic, saying in October 2020 that the country was "actually going in the wrong direction" when it came to COVID-19 deaths. Trump, at roughly the same point in time, called Fauci a "disaster," and said "people are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots."

Trump, meanwhile, denied Hemingway's suggestion that the coronavirus was intentionally spread from a lab in Wuhan, arguing that it was an accident even though China was among the "biggest beneficiaries" of the pandemic.

"No, I never thought China did it on purpose," Trump said. "I thought it was done out of incompetence and I may be wrong because they were the biggest beneficiaries. I felt it came from the lab from day one. I think it was an accident."

Hemingway's upcoming book "Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," is scheduled for an October 12 release.

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