Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro says in an interview this week that he pushed hard for ex-President Donald Trump to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, or to “strangle that Fauci baby in his crib,” but he was blocked by then-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and the “big four in the healthcare bureaucracy.”
“The bigger thing, breaking news here, was the coward in the chief of staff’s office,” Navarro said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” show, reports The Independent. “Acting chief Mick Mulvaney and the press shop were quivering in their knees at the thought that they might take any blowback if Fauci got fired.”
The “big four” he was referring to includes former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; Robert Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins; and Steven Hahn, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
“They were all like Fauci is the best thing that has happened since sliced bread,” Navarro told Bannon.
However, Navarro said he doesn’t blame Trump for not taking his advice.
“What am I, Steve?” said Navarro. “I am like the trade and economics guy. Meanwhile, he’s got all stuff going on … When the Mulvaney-ites and the press people were going, ‘No we can’t fire him [Fauci], blowback’.”
Navarro said he asked Trump twice to fire Fauci in hopes of preventing a “Churchill with Hitler” situation in the White House, but the “two forces” were protecting Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who now serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor.
“I go, no no, this is like Churchill with Hitler. Strangle that Fauci baby in his crib. Rip the band-aid off,” said Navarro. “I lost that. If I had known everything in Kennedy’s book then, I would have blown him up,” he said, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
In it, Kennedy blames Fauci for the COVID-19 pandemic’s spread. Navarro, in his own book, “In Trump Time,” also claims Fauci was to blame for the spread of COVID-19.
Navarro has slammed Fauci several times, including claiming he has “blood on his hands” because of the pandemic, calling him a “sociopath” and “narcissist,” and calling him “the most evil man I ever met.”