DeSantis can claim he would have fired Fauci all he wants to. If he was the president back in 2020 he would have been relying on the same health officials. I highly doubt he would have done anything substantially different.
The head of the freaking CDC himself, Robert Redford, disagreed with Fauci and others. Maybe Trump was just charmed by Fauci's New York accent....
One of the major problems with the way Trump handled COVID was that he really didn't handle it at all. Despite it being the single biggest crisis of his presidency, he outsourced management of COVID to Pence and Fauci, probably because he is not a detail guy and simply couldn't be bothered because he might have to read a briefing book or two. Because he didn't bother to get informed himself, he lacked the basis to review the data on his own, reach any of his own conclusions, or even to question the conclusions presented to him.
DeSantis and the other governors who chose a different direction began with the same federal data presented to Trump. The difference is they recognize the magnitude of what was being decided, and so got their hands dirty and got into the details. They looked at the numbers themselves, and questioned different medical experts.
The real issue is the language I bolded about Covid being just a "health issue".
It wasn't, and that's exactly the point that Trump and many others missed in all this. The job of our political leaders was twofold:
First, to consult medical experts to determine the risks posed by the virus, and what measures would best mitigate that risk. That was where Fauci fit in, and quite frankly, you'd naturally expect a medical guy to focus on the medical issues. Which he did.
Second, to look at the assessed medical risks, and then determine whether the benefit of those mitigating measures were worth the non-medical costs to society in terms of the economy, education, development of children, and simple enjoyment of life. And the medical people should have had nothing to do with that cost/benefit determination because they are not experts in those non-medical factors. That balancing of the medical burdens and societal costs should have been a determination made by our elected political leaders --
not outsourced to medical professionals. And that's basically what Trump did.
In contrast, those governors got medical input, but then accepted their responsibility to conduct that cost/benefit analysis where the economy, education, development of children, and basic enjoyment of life were given appropriate weight. And after weighing those competing interests, they came down on the side of freedom.
Trump just didn't do his job. He really didn't even try to.
