RUSH: Anthony Fauci. Can somebody explain something to me? Why is Anthony Fauci the only medical and health official anybody ever consults? Why wasn’t there a panel of doctors the Senate committee talked to yesterday? There’s all kinds of different doctors out there. There’s all kinds of different health experts. And they’ve all got their own theories of what’s going on here and how to deal with it, what’s the best course of action. There’s all kinds of thinking about this out there. Why is Anthony Fauci the only health official and doctor that’s consulted?

“Well, Rush he wasn’t. They had Redfield from the CDC.” That’s my point. They bring in all the government people. CDC, FEMA, Homeland Security, the same people we’ve been hearing from since this whole thing began, and none of ’em are saying a damn thing different from the first day they started talking to us. There have to be all kinds of health officials and doctors who have differing opinions who may have a more upbeat take on it, who may have a more optimistic outlook.

Where are they? Why are they not even consulted? Some of them are very, very well endowed educationally, work at some of the finest universities. Some of them work at the finest laboratories. They’d be more than willing to be consulted, I’m certain. Where are they? Why is it only this small, little static group?

Now, one of the things that happened yesterday, a kerfuffle. Dr. Fauci said that, well, we probably may not be able to start school in the fall because of the virus and the need for mitigation and social distancing and locking down and shutting down and so forth. A lot of people said, “Holy hell. No school in September?” So Lamar Alexander asked him about it. And he did seem to backtrack. But not really.

Can I tell you what the practical result of what Fauci saying that is? His opposition — and make no mistake about it — Fauci is opposed to opening schools. And it’s only the safest group of people in the country that go to schools. Young people are the least likely to get this. But when Fauci makes public his opposition to opening schools, my friends, it makes it practically impossible to reopen the country. “What do you mean by that? That’s a little bit extreme.” No. Wait. Stop and think a minute.

If you have the only health expert and doctor that we consult, and he’s out there saying no sports. Every time there’s good news, every time, you can count on there being cold water poured on it by Dr. Fauci or somebody in his group within 10 hours of that good story. But if you are not gonna permit the schools to reopen, then you can’t allow parents to go back to work, can you? If the kids are gonna stay home, if the kids are gonna be forced to stay home, how in hell can the parents go back to work? And if the parents can’t go back to work, then that’s not reopening the country.

Now, I realize not every adult has kids in school, but a hell of a lot do. And one of the things that makes two incomes possible is the kids getting out of house every day to go to school. And you close the schools and you do not allow them to reopen, you’re pretty much guaranteeing parents have to stay home, meaning what? They don’t get up and go out and leave the house and go to work. Meaning how the hell can you reopen the country? That’s the practical reaction and application to what Fauci said.

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RUSH: CNBC reporting that Dr. Fauci told Congress there’s no guarantee that a vaccine is actually going to be effective. So despite constantly saying that we need to wait for a vaccine, that we can’t get back to normal until we get a vaccine, that we don’t do sports and we can’t open school and we can’t do whatever the hell else Dr. Fauci is in charge of permitting, we can’t do it until we get a vaccine. And then he tells the senators yesterday that even if we get a vaccine there’s no guarantee it’s going to work.

Now, would somebody explain to me why this is the only person we hear from on this? As I said mere moments ago, there have to be countless of other genuine experts in the health field, in the medical field who have their own thinking on the virus and who have their own thoughts on what we’re doing to deal with it and what the future may look like and how we can do this or that.

Why do we not hear from them? Why did the Senate not talk to any of them? Why just the same people who’ve been saying the same stuff ever since the Coronavirus Task Force at the White House was put together? I mean, it is nothing but one downer after another. You can’t do this, you can’t do that unless you do this and unless you do that. But even if you do do that, we can’t guarantee that you’re not gonna die.

Sports? No. We can’t do sports. We can’t open up sports. We can’t open up schools ’til we have a vaccine. And even if we get a vaccine there’s no guarantee the vaccine’s gonna work. We don’t need this. Look, folks, everybody can be pessimistic on their own. We don’t need any help. We as Americans are fully capable of providing pessimism. We don’t need that from our leaders. We need some counter-thinking. We need some alternative thinking. We need some thinking from some people who think that this isn’t as bad as we’ve been told and it’s gonna get better and it can, because, you know what? That’s the bottom line. It will. It always does.

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RUSH: To Austin, Texas. This is Vickie, and it’s great to have you here. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush, and mega prayers to you, and my question is: Can you explain the bromance between Trump and Fauci? Because I don’t understand why he promotes this guy so much. Like at one of the press conferences, he said, “I keep telling Tony, he’s gotta run for office because he’d win,” and why doesn’t he have a panel of differing opinions? You’ve asked the question yourself. I heard you. But do you…? What…? You know this man. What do you think, Rush?

RUSH: Ha-ha-ha-ha. Yeah. I know this man. “You’re holdin’ back on us. Tell us the truth!” (big sigh) Okay.

CALLER: I mean, you have to have an opinion, right? Does he not see this as being anything political? I know he’s smart. Why is it…? You know, I mean, is he listening to talking heads? It’s not his instinct. He can’t be sitting back watching the country die —

RUSH: No, no.

CALLER: — and not be thinking, “This is wrong.”

RUSH: No. I think it’s a combination of things. I think that he felt he had to bend as far as he could without breaking so that he could say that he listened to these people, because they are… You can’t change the way the media reports on him. He can’t change their reputations.

He can’t change their perceived stature, and he probably wouldn’t even want to try. So I think he felt like he was bending the bow as far as he could without breaking it to say he had listened to them, that he had tried to follow the science, that he was doing everything he could do that they advocated to save lives.

CALLER: (crosstalk)

RUSH: And I think he realizes now that he’s a gotta let go of these people or we’re not gonna bounce back. I think he knows it. I think… I hope he’s got five months to get the country moving while this —

CALLER: (crosstalk)

RUSH: I’m hoping that the virus goes dormant in the summertime. I hear you’re trying to get in here. What are you trying to say?

CALLER: I’m trying to say, you were saying, “He’s listening to ‘them’ and ‘they.'” Them and they is Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. What about all those other many, many experts?

RUSH: I know! I know! I’m trying to explain to you why.

CALLER: I’m sorry, Rush. Go ahead.

RUSH: It’s because their reputations cannot be sullied. It would be a lose-lose if he came out and said, “Fauci, you’re a punk, you’re a pretender. You’re trying to destroy me! Screw you, Fauci! Get outta here.” It would be over for Trump if you did that. That’s what you want him to do, but he can’t do it. I’ll tell you: I think Trump hopes for the best in everybody.

And despite everything that’s happened to him, I think that he hoped that all these people would actually put all of this partisanship aside and come together and unify for the purposes of saving the country. I don’t think that he was initially suspicious that some of these people would actually be attempting to destroy the country in order to destroy him.

CALLER: Well, that’s probably true but —

RUSH: I think he gave them the benefit of the doubt and again. He’s awakened now. Let me tell you how you deal with Fauci. You praise him to the hilt, exactly like Trump is doing. You praise him to the hilt. You talk about how brilliant he is, and you say that we’re so lucky to have Fauci.

“Oh, my God. Tony, you should run for office,” and then privately you ignore every damn thing he says and implement your own policy. That’s the only way you can do it. Now, don’t repeat that, ’cause then the policy, the secret would be let out of the bag.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: But that’s how you deal with these people.

CALLER: Well, will President Trump do that?

RUSH: I think he already is.

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RUSH: Man, you people are all over me today. It’s like I’m president. It’s like I’m the guy that won’t get rid of Fauci. It’s like I’m the guy that won’t prosecute Obama. It’s like I’m the guy that won’t do any of this stuff. You want to keep beating up on me, have at it. It’s great radio and I’ll be more than happy to try to explain my way out of it.

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RUSH: So the last caller wanted to know, “Why isn’t Trump getting rid of Fauci? Why hasn’t Fauci been thrown out on his ass? Why doesn’t Trump get some people in there other than Fauci and listen to them? Why is it always Fauci and Birx? These people are nothing but negative. They’re doing nothing but telling us what can’t be done. Why isn’t Trump listening to anybody else?” and I attempted to explain the answer and ran out of time.

So let me try again. Now, this first thing I want to say, folks, you got to keep this between you and me. (sigh) You can’t tell anybody this, ’cause if you tell anybody this, the whole… It’s like a marketing plan. You don’t tell people what it is. You just execute it. The way to deal… Look, it’s not with just Dr. Fauci. Let’s first examine what Trump has to deal with in dealing with Fauci.

You can’t find in that town right now, outside of Obama, anybody with a more perfect reputation, a more perfect legacy. There’s nothing anybody can do to change that. Fauci got started, became known and became nationally known when he was seen as the lone advocate for the gay community when the AIDS outbreak hit in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan became enemy number one.

AIDS became something that existed because Reagan made it possible. Reagan was responsible for AIDS, and you know why? ‘Cause Reagan didn’t talk about it, and since Reagan didn’t talk about it, it meant that Reagan didn’t care. If Reagan didn’t care about AIDS, then Reagan didn’t care about homosexuals, and into this stepped Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci became the face of the federal government’s efforts to come up with either a vaccine, a cure, a fix — or alternatively, a way to make sure that it was not seen as a behaviorally spread disease. This was fundamentally key. Back then, AIDS was spread by behavior. There were two things. If you didn’t want to get AIDS, there were two things that you could avoid it and you could be assured of not getting AIDS.

Well, or HIV, which is the virus that causes AIDS. One of those things was gay male anal sex. The other was taking your chance on a contaminated blood transfusion. Well, that couldn’t stand. We couldn’t let that stand. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So Dr. Fauci helped popularize the idea that it was not behaviorally spread.

He became the number one defender of the group that was the most susceptible to getting AIDS. As such, he was immediately loved, adored, protected by the American media, the American left. Even though some in the AIDS activist community had problems with Fauci, it was because he wouldn’t go far enough. So Fauci’s career since then has blossomed and been promoted.

To where now he is the nation’s foremost authority on disease, period — and Trump inherits that. Trump becomes president, but over there at the NIH is Dr. Fauci. So when this hit… I’m gonna jump forward. I’m just trying to explain to you why and how Fauci’s untouchable. Well, I say “untouchable.” Trump could fire him, but, I mean, what do you think would happen if he did?

I’m sure that if Trump did that, that would have been akin to firing Mueller during the Mueller investigation. He could have done it. But the judgment was made it wouldn’t be worth the hassle that it created, and the same thing here. So I actually think when this all started… You know, Donald Trump is not that hard to understand. He doesn’t hate people. He loves everybody.

And he wants to be liked and respected himself, like we all do. I think that he did not consider that he would be taken advantage of or that he would be disrespected or used by these people because of the severity of this, the seriousness of it. I think that he expected that all of these people would be unified and behind him in his efforts to deal with the virus and to come up with policies to limit the damage.

I think he thought they’d be supportive of the efforts he put in place to build ventilators and come up with correct number of masks, and any number of other elements to this. Now, I could be wrong about that. He may not… He may have awakened and he may not have been fooled by these people. I hope I’m wrong about it, actually, but I think if it is, it’s simply because of the severe nature of this.

Look, I know he knows that they hate him. There’s no question that they do. They despise him and they resent him every bit as much as the Russian collusion crowd resents him for being president. But I really think that he was hoping they would put it aside for this! This is a deadly pandemic, and I’m thinking that he’s thinking that maybe they’ll put it aside for this.

He knows they didn’t now.

He knows the blue state governors are tanking on purpose. He knows that they are attempting to go belly up to get a federal bailout to wipe out every fiscal problem that they have. He knows he’s gotta get the country up and running. He’s probably aware that he was being taken advantage of and being disrespected again despite his best efforts to meet these health and medical people on his task force halfway.

I don’t think all of them are out to frustrate him, but some of them are. Now, some of this was also because he had to because of who Fauci and Birx are and the place they occupy in the public trust. There are just some realities that you can’t change and that you have to adapt to if you’re Trump. I think that he felt that he was bending the bow as far as he could without breaking it so that he could say he listened to the experts.

He tried to follow the science. He did what he did to save lives. He went along with the shutdown when they told him 2.2 million could die. He said, “They told me, ‘Sir, you gotta shut it down. You gotta shut it down.’ I shut it down.” He now realizes we gotta go back. We gotta open back up or we’re not gonna bounce back — and if anybody knows it, he knows it.

I really hope that he has the five months that it may take to get the country moving. I’m hoping that what I’ve heard about the virus maybe going dormant with warm weather in most of the country, I hope that happens. I hope it does go dormant. And, by the way, these people predicting a second wave?

That’s a wild guess too. That’s just more negative fearmongering. It may happen; it may not. We don’t know until it happens. He would have been eaten alive if he had not engaged in some kind of lockdown. He would have been eaten alive politically. So he had to do it. Two weeks would have been my max, tops.

But I’m just a guy on the radio, and I don’t have any responsibility on my shoulders about this at all. So it’s easy for me to sit here and offer armchair analysis. But I think he had to do what he did, and I think he had to acknowledge it. He had to make it look like he was working with these people because they had the public trust.

I think the weather, the natural attenuation of the virus is gonna prevent a major return of it. The Drive-Bys and the media are all hopefully writing about the second wave. And I have not fallen for that. If Trump can get the economy looking like it’s gonna be okay by September or October, then he’ll be able to say that he beat the virus and he saved the country. Now, while this period of time between now and October is going on, you can still have all these naysayers out there.

You’re gonna have all these people saying he’s screwing it up, that he doesn’t care, that Trump’s killing people, all this sort of thing. He’s got to persevere. Now, this is what you gotta keep to yourself. This is what you can’t tell anybody about how to deal with the Faucis of the task force and whoever else that occupies a similar position of standing. You listen to them, you keep them on the task force, you praise them to the heavens, you thank them every day for their contributions, you ask them for more. You continue to seek their expertise. And then you just ignore everything they tell you.

You go talk to your other experts, consult other people that may have a different perspective or different thoughts, different predictions. But he can’t just go in and fire these people on his task force that he put together, that he and Pence put together, that he and Pence have praised and thanked and all that. I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking that he’s surrounded by a bunch of saboteurs, and because you’re Republicans and conservatives, you think the saboteurs win every time they try. And you think that the Republicans are gullible and don’t see what’s coming until it’s too late, ’til they’re already destroyed.

Well, I understand your thinking on that, but that’s not applicable with Trump. He knows full well who’s lined up against him. He knows full well how they’re trying to pull it off. He knows completely what the agenda of the people who are trying to destroy him is. And he knows the lengths to which they will go. So don’t think that the saboteurs have fooled him. But there is a way you deal with ’em publicly. And it’s the way I just laid out.