“I’ve chosen this life. I know what it is. There are things about it that sometimes are disturbing. But you just focus on the job you have to do. And just put all that other stuff aside.””   

The speaker wasn’t a longtime Mafia enforcer turned-State’s-witness. He was Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

And he was speaking with an NBC News reporter about death threats he had received.

At 81, Fauci was getting the sort of protection reserved for organized crime witnesses through the Justice Department’s Witness Security Program.

Dr. Anthony Fauci

The U.S. Marshals Service had deputized nine officers from the Department of Health and Human Services as bodyguards for Fauci.

So what did this man—who has dedicated his entire adult life to protecting Americans against infectious diseases—do to require such protection? 

He had merely spoken the hard medical truth about Coronavirus. In doing so, he had at times contradicted then-President Donald Trump’s ignorance- and lie-riddled statements. 

For example: Trump had loudly touted hydroxychloroquine, used for treating malaria, as a miracle cure for the Coronavirus.

Yet Fauci dared to point out there have been no scientific trials of the drug for its effectiveness against Coronavirus. Moreover, given the medical condition of some patients, it could even prove fatal.

Statements like this infuriated Trump’s base of—at best—half-educated fans.

During the 2016 Presidential race, after winning the Nevada primary, Trump infamously celebrated his victory: “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”   

A February 24, 2016 USA Today story covering this event carried the headline: “Donald Trump loves the poorly educated—and they love him.”

And at the bottom of the story came this warning: “Some—journalists, mostly—noted that Trump’s proud embrace of poorly less educated voters and the resulting shock may only cause those less educated voters to embrace Trump all the more.” 

And they do.

There has been a growing divide between Democrats and Republicans on the merits of higher education.

An August 20, 2019 story in Forbes noted that a Pew Research survey, conducted in July, had found that “67% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents say higher education is having a positive effect on the country compared to only 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning participants.“

Furthermore, “the percentage of Republicans attributing a positive effect to higher education has steadily eroded from 58% (2010), 53% (2012), 54% (2015), 43% (2016), and 36% (2017). Among Republicans, 59% now say higher education has a negative effect on the U.S., compared to just 18% of Democrats.”

In 2026, 23% of Republicans expressed confidence in higher education, while 50% of Democrats did.

In March, 2020, as COVID-19 raged unchecked throughout the country, an NBC News poll found that that only 30% of Republicans said they would actually listen to the advice of doctors to stay away from large, crowded areas to avoid Coronavirus.

These are the same people who get their version of reality from Right-wing sources like Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh. 

Rush Limbaugh

On his March 27, 2020 show, Limbaugh dismissed Coronavirus as “the common cold,” then added: “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. 

“And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they’ve been in the job for a while, and they’re at the CDC and they’re at the NIH, and they’re up, well—yeah, they’ve been there, and they are there.

“But has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government. But, these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.” 

This is the same Rush Limbaugh who said, in 2015: “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”

Five years later, in February, 2020, Limbaugh—a longtime and heavy cigar smoker—announced that he had Stage Four lung cancer. He died on February 17, 2021.

And then there was President Trump—and his chorus of cheerleaders.

On February 25, 2020, Kayleigh McEnany, his fourth press secretary in three years, said on Fox Business: “This President will always put America first. He will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the Coronavirus come here.” 

During February and March, he repeatedly downplayed the threat of the disease, even as it spread across the United States.

By the time Trump left office—on January 20, 2021—more than 400,000 Americans had died of COVID-19.

These, then, are the types of “reliable sources” that millions of Right-wingers take as gospel—while dismissing the warnings of the medical profession as erroneous or, worse, products of a liberal conspiracy.

And by daring to contradict such blatant ignorance—if not outright lies—Dr. Anthony Fauci made himself a target for Right-wing hatred and death threats.

On January 23, 2025, a re-elected President Donald Trump—who has been guarded by the Secret Service since 2015—removed Fauci’s taxpayer-funded federal security detail.

Fauci subsequently hired a private security team.