Just like he did Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson spent a portion of his show on Wednesday attacking the ever-popular Dr. Anthony Fauci. But in a strange twist, the thing Carlson went after Fauci for on Tuesday is something that Donald Trump also did.
“Dr. Tony Fauci, who is a stone-cold genius who you are not allowed to question, told us that masks do not work, in fact they may harm you. Now he’s telling us they’re completely essential,” Carlson said as he teased his next segment before a commercial break.
“Fauci has been wrong quite a bit, sometimes he’s absurd. Now he’s praising China for its transparency and we have the tape of that. We’re not attacking him, okay!” he added sarcastically.
By “now,” Carlson was referring to an interview from Jan. 22.
“It’s possible that no doctor in American history has ever had as much power as Tony Fauci has right now, Carlson said when he returned from the break. “But Fauci is not God, despite his apparent omniscience. He told us that masks didn’t work and could hurt us. Later, he changed course and said they were mandatory. He said Americans shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus even as it bore down on this country.
“And then earlier this year, here’s a tape we just found. Here’s what Tony Fauci said about China.”
In the clip shown, which was from a roundtable that took place on Fox News, Fauci said this:
“From what I can see right now, they are really being much, much more transparent than what happened with SARS, where they really kept back information for a while. It was really embarrassing to them. They’re really transparent now, they put the sequence of the virus up on the public database right away, so in that respect they’ve been transparent.”
Carlson then used that clip as the jumping-off point for his discussion with Fox News correspondent Marc Siegel, who opened his response by saying, “I want to start by saying that I have a lot of respect for Dr Fauci for many years.”
Then Siegel spent the next few minutes going after Fauci for those China comments, as well as Fauci’s stance on school reopenings — “Schools are off the table,” he said. Carlson let Siegel do most of the talking.
Siegel’s final comment on the matter: “Politically, if you think the Democrats are going to let the liberal colleges stay closed, think again. Those are their future voters.”
This is an interesting line of attack for Carlson, because these comments from Fauci — which used qualifying language like “from what I can see right now” — were common sentiments from the White House at the time. Trump made very similar comments frequently in January and February and even into March.
Here’s a Trump tweet from March 26:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1243407157321560071
You can catch the portion of Carlson’s show Wednesday that focused on Dr. Fauci in the video embedded up at the top of this article.