Tony's Diary Package — page 67

from Maureen Dowd retical kevin.cullen@globe.com It may be too late to save Fauci. He just got the star treatment from Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. There used to be a thing called the Sports Illustrated curse, that after an athlete appeared on its cover his or her career tanked. Similarly, being in the Trump administration and getting praised by The New York Times is the kiss of death. Now, normally, you could print something in the Times and chances were the president wouldn't read it. He routinely dismisses the Gray Old Lady as fake news, except when his and his family's lousy books are mass-bought onto the newspaper's bestsellers list. He is not fond of polysyllabic words and prefers to get his news from "Fox & Friends" or whatever white nationalist website his aide Stephen Miller might recommend. But Trump reads Mo Dowd because they have known each other forever and she writes about him at a nuanced, personal level that drives him especially cuckoo. We're way past the theoretical here. Tony Fauci is in real danger, and by extension so are the rest of us who expect -- nay, pray for -- one person in the White House to be trustworthy and competent in a time of unprecedented crisis. So, again, repeat after me, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a bum. Long live the bum. Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com. Search many other similar articles from today (Wash Post, etc.) TF meeting today at 3:00. Met with Joe Grogan and importantly with Jared Kushner about the strategy to get Trump to be more flexible instead of sticking to his desire to lift the mitigations by Easter Sunday. Then met with Trump in the Oval. As usual he was wondeful to me, asking me most of the questions. He fixed on easter and I pushed back and said we need more data that we would get with testing to be able to inform policy about mitigation. He ent back and forth, but agreed. He fixed on the increase in the stock marhet by 2000 points (biggest increase in nistory); hweoevr, wew recently had the biggest drop in history. He also focuse on his approval rating for how he is handleing the outbreak. It is all polls, ratings, and image. In some ways he is endearing, but he