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Ramesh Ponnuru, Columnist

Trump’s War on Fauci May End in Defeat for Both

The president is in the wrong, but it could benefit public health if the scientist took a lower profile.

One of them has it right on masks.

Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images  

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Down double digits in some polls with less than four months until the election, President Donald Trump has decided that it’s time to launch an attack against … his own adviser. Who’s much more popular than he is. Trump has rewritten the political rulebook over the last four years, but this revision seems unlikely to stick.

White House aides have been distributing a memo criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, and one went so far as to write an op-ed article slamming him. Trump himself has shared criticisms of Fauci on Twitter and made his own in interviews. But he has also chided the aide who wrote the anti-Fauci op-ed piece, economic adviser Peter Navarro, since this White House is incapable of sticking to one story.