Molly Hemmingway interviewed the President for a new book she is writing about the 2020 election.

I peppered Trump about why he had enabled Anthony Fauci, who relished his role in advocating lockdowns and other authoritarian responses to the COVID pandemic. Trump defended him in part, as did so many others I spoke with in the Trump administration. But Trump conceded Fauci had faults.

“Well, who knew that he knew so little? Anthony Fauci is a good promoter—he’s a great promoter. He is a better baseball pitcher than he is predicting what to do with people’s health,” Trump said, needling him about the wild first pitch he threw at a Major League Baseball game during his 2020 publicity tour.

I asked Trump at a later interview whether he ever got suspicious about what was by that point acknowledged to be a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Trump had been excoriated by the press for suggesting COVID-19 had leaked from the lab, disagreeing with the cover story from China and the World Health Organization that it had been initially spread via a nearby wet market. A year later, many in corporate media begrudgingly acknowledged his suggestion was accurate.

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