WaPo’s Rucker: Dr. Fauci Is in the President’s Ear Every Day, but Trump Takes Advice from Outside the Government

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Janet Ybarra
Democrat
Former Washington Journalist
Contributor on The Bipartisan Press

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Donald Trump continues to focus on pushing an controversial anti-malaria drug for use as a treatment against COVID-19 because he listens to an “echo chamber” of Fox News program hosts on the matter, over the advice of true experts like top immunologist Dr Anthony Fauci, according to a White House correspondent for The Washington Post.

Trump has become a fierce cheerleader for the use of hydroxychloroquine to cure COVID-19, even though medical professionals like Dr Fauci, a member of the federal coronavirus task force and a chief adviser to Trump on the pandemic, consistently warn against it.

“It’s a bit of an echo chamber and he doesn’t just hear about this on Fox News by the way, we reported that he was paid a visit in the Oval Office by a Fox host, Laura Ingraham, who’s a supporter and friend of the president and she brought along with her two doctors who are part of her on-air television medicine cabinet and they had a meeting with the president last Friday in the Oval Office where they pitched him on this drug and talked to him about how effective they think it is and how so many people in New York have started to experiment with it and take it and made the president believe that it saves lives and it’s one of many voices in the president’s ear these last couple of weeks that are sort of feeding this belief that he has that this is the magical cure all,” said Philip Rucker, White House bureau chief for The Post.

Trump continues to listen to these TV hosts for his advice on the COVID-19 pandemic, Rucker said, which has taken the lives of more than 20,000 Americans.

“Dr. Fauci [is] one of the nation’s renowned infectious disease experts,” Rucker told Joy Reid during a segment of her MSNBC program. “He’s in [Trump’s] ear, he’s in the meetings with the president but the president as we’ve seen for the last three years taking advice from outside the government and he seems to equate what Fox News people say on the air waves that he watches with what the experts in the government are saying. It’s the reason why he doesn’t always believe what the intelligence people are telling him.”