OPA-LOCKA, Fla. (NewsNation Now) — After a “Fire Fauci” chant broke out at a late-night campaign rally in Florida, President Donald Trump responded by saying, “Let me wait until a little bit after the election.”
“Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election,” he said early Monday, in response to the chant directed at the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Trump went on to defend his handling of the pandemic at the rally, which took place at the Opa-Locka airport in the Miami area.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden commented on Twitter hours later, “We need a president who actually listens to experts like Dr. Fauci.”
The president’s remarks come after Fauci recently criticized Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Fauci, who’s director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has taken issue with Trump’s repeated assertions that the U.S. fight against the virus was “rounding the turn,” when tens of thousands of people are being infected daily.
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Fauci told The Washington Post on Friday. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Other members of the White House coronavirus task force have grown increasingly vocal about what they see as a dangerous fall spike in the virus.
According to the latest numbers from Johns Hopkins University, the coronavirus death toll in the U.S. has surpassed 231,000, part of the more than 1.2 million deaths globally.