Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took a swipe at former President Donald Trump during a Fox News interview Friday, slamming the 2024 frontrunner’s recent claim that he was not allowed to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci during his time as president.
Trump told talk show host Hugh Hewitt in a Wednesday interview that he was not permitted to fire Fauci — who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 through the end of 2022 — because he was in “civil service.” Career civil servants are shielded by federal law from politically motivated dismissal.
Trump then repeated his claim that DeSantis “shut down his beaches” as well as the “entire state” of Florida.
During the Fox News interview, the governor called on Trump to “take responsibility” for allowing Fauci to push shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates on Americans throughout the U.S. during the pandemic.
“When we reopened this state, [Fauci] criticized us. When we had kids in school, the first state in the country with all school districts, he criticized us. When we said no vax mandates, they criticized us,” DeSantis said. “So, we had to chart the course and obviously the results speak for themselves because people flooded into Florida.”
He pushed back against Trump’s claim that Florida had the third highest death rate from COVID in the country and that he presided over a major lockdown. In 2021, Florida had the third-highest number of total COVID-19 deaths but ranked 18th in COVID-19 death rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (RELATED: Trump’s Line Of Attack Against DeSantis Could Backfire In A Major Way)
“Yeah, that’s total nonsense,” DeSantis said.
The governor further criticized Trump for a re-election campaign advertisement from Oct. 2020 praising the then-president’s handling of the pandemic. It showed a clip of Fauci saying, “I can’t imagine that … anyone could be doing more.” A frustrated Fauci said the ad took his comment out of context.
“Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in October of 2020 was running ads bragging with Fauci saying, ‘Trump did everything I wanted him to do.’ They were putting that out and they were bragging about it,” DeSantis said. “And then on January 19, 2021, Donald Trump’s last day as president, he gave Fauci a presidential commendation. So those were wrong, to do that, and clearly, I think the important thing is this: looking forward, we need accountability for what went wrong, because those people in positions of authority at the CDC, Fauci, they lied about lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates.
“They were wrong. It did a lot of damage around this country and I know that because the people that were harmed, a lot of them came to Florida and would tell us about it. So we need a reckoning so that this never happens to our country again and we instituted permanent protections in Florida against mask mandates, against all this stuff,” DeSantis concluded.
Areas across the U.S. are attempting to reinstate mask mandates. Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, decided to require N95 masks for third graders after a few students tested positive for COVID.
“We know that doesn’t work,” DeSantis said regarding Montgomery County. “So, we’ve got to clear house on these medical bureaucracies, we need evidence-based medicine, not narrative-based policies.”