President Trump boasted that he was enjoying the “protective glow” of immunity from COVID-19 on Sunday, one day after claiming that the coronavirus was “disappearing,” despite an ongoing surge of cases around the country. But while the president has survived COVID-19, whatever immunity he now has won’t protect him from American voters. Following Trump’s infection and the White House outbreak, the president’s mishandling of the pandemic now threatens his political mortality more than ever. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday found that Joe Biden held a 17-point lead over Trump on the question of who Americans trusted more to handle the pandemic, and the sentiment appears to be expanding the former vice-president’s lead over Trump. Per ABC News, “Two-thirds of registered voters say Trump failed to take appropriate precautions against the virus, 62 percent distrust what he says about it, and eight months since its arrival in the United States just 21 percent say it’s under control.” Indeed there is no evidence that Trump has received, or will receive, any political benefit from his illness, despite his and his allies’ ongoing attempts to spin his ordeal as some kind of windfall for his campaign or the country. In addition, Trump’s post-illness double-down on dismissing the threat of COVID-19 seems likely to make the political impact worse, as does a new feud between the Trump team and the nation’s most respected infectious-disease expert. At the beginning of ABC News’ This Week on Sunday morning, host Jonathan Karl announced that the White House “wouldn’t allow” Dr. Anthony Fauci (or any other medical expert on the White House coronavirus task force) to appear on the show. Then later in the day, Dr. Fauci publicly rebuked a misleading new Trump campaign ad that frames a comment he made back in March as an endorsement of the president’s overall handling of the pandemic — which it definitely was not. The ad, which begins with a narrator claiming, “President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America,” later features Fauci appearing to say, regarding Trump, “I can’t imagine … that anybody could be doing more.” “In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,” Fauci said in a statement on Sunday. “The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public-health officials.” The president and the Trump campaign have since made it clear that they don’t care what Fauci actually thinks, and the campaign says it will not stop airing the ad. Trump does, however, care about what he authorized his doctor to say about his illness. White House physician Dr. Sean Conley announced on Saturday night that, after reviewing Trump’s latest test results and symptoms, the COVID-19-infected president was “no longer considered a transmission risk to others.” It was yet
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