The dynamic duo of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx spent nine months of 2020 (February-October) appearing to be the adults in the room who had to deal with, as the legacy media loved to frame it, an ever petulant, ill-informed, and dangerous President Donald J. Trump.

In CNN’s ‘COVID War’ Special on Sunday, I surmise that all doubt was removed on who the adults were, and it certainly was not these doctors. The wholesale campaign to throw the president, and others, under the bus on the COVID policy that they helped to create, then taking credit for the COVID breakthroughs that they had little to do with, is reminiscent of children jockeying for position to benefit themselves.

While Drs. Fauci and Birx focused on playing politics and trying to make themselves look good, people lost their lives and livelihoods.

CNN was ambivalent, and often downright hostile, over covering the White House Coronavirus briefings, even calling them a replacement for Trump campaign rallies. Now, CNN is rushing to create their own revisionist history of how the COVID-19 response from the White House actually went down.

My colleague Brad Slager wrote about that revisionism in a detailed Townhall piece:

This revisionism is seen throughout the CNN special, beginning with the biggest vacillating expert on the matter, Dr. Anthony Fauci. This man has been the source of so many conflicting declarations over the year that anyone still regarding him as an authority on this pandemic deserves whatever embarrassment they receive. Here we listen to Fauci say he “would have been horrified if he knew a year ago that 500,000 Americans would eventually lose their lives to Covid-19.’’ This is almost laughable, as Fauci has been all over the map as far as his documented claims of how many people he expected to fall victim to the virus.

Two of the claims CNN touts as being among the big revelations seem to contradict each other. Dr. Deborah Birx talks about how actions taken could have mitigated deaths, but Dr. Robert Redfield of the CDC states he believes the transmissions could have been taking place in the Fall of 2019. Back then no one had a clue of this, including the World Health Organization which did not acknowledge the reality until mid to late January 2020.

Birx also makes a statement about the administration possibly being stalled at times because they were receiving so much intel at once — “there were too many parallel streams of data.” Now, this seems to contradict the running narrative that Trump last year was ignoring the science and the experts. But also, Dr. Birx seems to be excusing herself in this statement. It was she, and Dr. Fauci, who counseled the president to follow with their suggested shutdown protocols based on the Imperial College Pandemic Models. That is the study that has now largely been dismissed, as it was declaring the possibility of 2.2 million deaths, and all but assuring that over 1.5 million would take place.

The entire CNN special was a bundle of contradictions. If these medical professionals were as troubled as they make out, why not speak out before now? It is not like legacy media and progressive-leaning sentiment were not on their side. From my perspective, they were playing both ends against the middle, and the American people are the ones who lost.

Dr. Fauci is the poster child of this. We have reported on his shifting COVID advice and predictions here, here, here, and in other places on the RedState page. Fauci’s craven need for attention (what doctor warrants an In Style cover?), and his desire to appear like an all-knowing father is rather nauseating, and I would say has been a detriment, rather than a help, to the lives of the American people.

Dr. Birx was harder to pin down, because of her “on point” scarf game and reasonable-looking graphs. Birx did not initially come off as a political animal. Birx’s mask fully fell at the end of 2020, when she urged people to not travel and stay home for the holidays, then was busted for doing the exact thing she cautioned others against.

Then, Dr. Birx blamed the media for dragging her family into it and politicizing the matter, all the while cloaking herself in the importance of “her work”. So, the hypocrisy and shamelessness of doing a CNN special to paint herself in a better light come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.

As I have said before, the mistake the legacy media is making in trying to paint the Trump administration in shades of their choosing, is their rush to reinvent what is still very fresh in people’s minds, and very well-documented by alternative media, new media, and the people who were not partisan hacks and also had a seat at the table. You have former President Trump and people on the Coronavirus Task Force team who are more than willing to push back on this revisionism.

Dr. Scott Atlas was a later arrival to the Task Force, and sadly, was pushed out by all the politically petulant child-doctors in the CNN Special.

Atlas had this to say about the documentary:

In response, Atlas said the two ex-officials don’t understand what their positions truly represented, and they have no regard for the economic impact of their decisions.

“I’m speechless, again they don’t understand what they advocated was done. I was the one brought in because I was the only one who cared what was happening by shutting down medical care, closing schools, closing businesses, destroying low income families, sacrificing our children,” he said.

“This is insane, it is despicable. I’m shocked but I shouldn’t be… These people don’t know the truth if it hit them in the head,” he said.

“You’re blaming people for criticizing what was done and those are the people on your show who wanted what was done. They ought to look in the mirror and they ought to go on TV and apologized if they think 500,000 people died, they were the cause of the policy, they recommended the policy.”

As is his hallmark, President Trump had the very last word. This March 29 letter from the Office of the 45th President has been circulated widely on social media — despite Big Tech’s ban of President Trump and his words.

Many of you will be upset that I am sharing this new statement from The Former Guy but it’s such an incoherent word salad that you really need to read it for yourselves. pic.twitter.com/gY6cWzLXtB

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) March 29, 2021

Yet, this legacy media person could not help but share it. The letter is anything but incoherent, and certainly not word salad. As always, President Trump gets straight to the point, and unlike in salads, he does no mincing.

Trump wrote, in part:

Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned. They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine–putting millions of lives at risk.

[…]

Dr. Birx is a proven liar with very little credibility left. Many of her recommendations were viewed as “pseudo-science,” and Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room with her.

[…]

She was a very negative voice who didn’t have the right answers. Time has proven me correct. I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long–they are like a bad habit!

Among Trump’s mistakes, keeping Fauci and Birx around was definitely a major one. I often wonder how many lives and livelihoods could have been saved had these two obstructionists and grandstanders not been influencing the very policy they now claim was “troubling” and “chaotic”?

Both Fauci and Birx have stayed too long at the Swamp Fair, and have capitalized on it monetarily and with media exposure not befitting their station.