WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump dismissed precautions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and attacked the nation's top infectious-disease expert as a "disaster" Monday, saying people are getting tired of the focus on a pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans and continues to infect thousands of people.
The president claimed that voters do not want to hear more about the pandemic from the country's scientific leaders, responding to Dr. Anthony Fauci's critical interview with CBS' "60 Minutes."
Meanwhile, the Commission on Presidential Debates said Monday night that it will mute the microphones of Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden during parts of Thursday's final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn.
"People are tired of listening to Fauci and these idiots," Trump said in a call with his campaign staff Monday that was intended to instill confidence in his reelection bid two weeks before Election Day. He baselessly suggested that Fauci's advice on how best to respond to the outbreak was so bad it would have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people.
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"And yet we keep him," Trump continued, calling in from his Las Vegas hotel. "Every day he goes on television there's always a bomb, but there's a bigger bomb if you fire him. But Fauci is a disaster."
Trump also expressed optimism: "We're going to win," he told the campaign staffers, though he conceded that he "wouldn't have told you that maybe two or three weeks ago," when he was hospitalized with covid-19 and many of his top aides were also infected.
But he said he felt better now than at any point in 2016. "We're in the best shape we've ever been," Trump said.
Trump ticked through states and bragged about the crowds he gets and the unspecified poll results he has seen, which he claimed were different from the voter "suppression polls" reported publicly.
"I go to a rally, I have 25,000 people," Trump said, exaggerating the size of his crowds while making a comparison with Biden. "He goes to a rally, he has four people." Most of Trump's rallies are held outside at airports because of the pandemic.
Later in the day, the president again criticized Fauci, mocking the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for his opening pitch at Nationals Park earlier this year and misrepresenting some of the doctor's positions on the virus in a series of tweets.
Trump also tried to tie Biden to Fauci: "He wants to listen to Dr. Fauci," the president said at a rally in Prescott, Ariz.
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Biden said he considered the claim that he would listen to scientists "a badge of honor."
"Mr. President, you're right about one thing: The American people are tired. They're tired of your lies about this virus," said a Biden statement. "They're tired of watching more Americans die and more people lose their jobs because you refuse to take this pandemic seriously."
As Trump turned his flouting of scientific advice into a campaign applause line, Tennessee GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander said that if more Americans had heeded Fauci's advice, "we'd have fewer cases of covid-19, and it would be safer to go back to school and back to work and out to eat."
FAUCI: NO SURPRISE
Fauci said on the "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday that it was "absolutely" no surprise that Trump got sick with the coronavirus given his lax attitude toward social distancing guidance.
"I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation: crowded, no separation between people and almost nobody wearing a mask," referring to the White House event last month announcing the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
"When I saw that on TV, I said, 'Oh, my goodness, nothing good can come out of that -- that's got to a be a problem,'" Fauci said. "Sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event."
Fauci, who has often been at odds with the president, also sharpened his stance against an ad run by the reelection campaign that appeared to show the doctor praising Trump's handling of the coronavirus. Fauci said his words were taken out of context and that their use was inappropriate because he never endorses candidates.
When he saw the ad, he said, steam came out of his ears: "I got really ticked off."
Fauci also pushed back against criticism that he had flip-flopped on whether the public should wear masks, saying that changing course after examining further data shows honesty.
The National Academy of Medicine honored Fauci on Monday with its first Presidential Citation for Exemplary Leadership, citing his "distinguished service as a trusted adviser to six U.S. presidents during public health crises" and "steady leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic."
ON THE ROAD
Trump's comments and his aggressive travel schedule, which continued Monday with two stops in Arizona as Biden holed up in his Delaware home preparing for Thursday's debate, is part of an aggressive bet that the American public will reward his projection of strength and general defiance of the virus.
Trump is expected to do three or four rallies a day starting this weekend, according to people familiar with the plans.
"I'm not running scared," Trump told reporters before taking off for Tucson for his fifth rally in three days. "I think I'm running angry. I'm running happy and I'm running very content 'cause I've done a great job."
In Arizona, Trump said Americans were no longer interested in taking precautions to prevent the spread of the virus.
"They're getting tired of the pandemic, aren't we? You turn on CNN. That's all they cover. Covid, covid, pandemic. Covid, covid, covid. They're trying to talk people out of voting ... People aren't buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards," Trump said. The crowd was packed shoulder-to-shoulder outside, with few masks in sight.
The president's comments come as infection rates have risen in recent weeks amid cooling temperatures in many states, with national daily infection rates returning to midsummer levels.
Trump aides said they had hoped Monday's last-minute call with staffers would not become a story about the coronavirus. Senior advisers say they still want the closing message to be about the economy and the negative impacts of a Biden victory, with a campaign focus on Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
They see the coronavirus -- and the president's handling of the pandemic -- as their biggest political weakness, and Biden's top advisers agree. But Trump continues to call attention to the outbreak.
PRE-DEBATE COMPLAINTS
As Trump has barnstormed the West Coast in recent days, Biden has mostly stayed out of public view, preparing for the debate and avoiding large crowds amid the pandemic.
Advisers said Trump is unlikely to do any extensive preparation for the debate. He's expected to visit Florida afterward for a series of events, they said.
On Monday, campaign manager Bill Stepien wrote a letter to the debate commission seeking to move the conversation in the final debate away from domestic issues such as coronavirus to foreign policy issues. The president's aides have made clear that the president wants to debate the foreign business dealings of Biden's youngest son, Hunter.
Trump and his allies have also repeatedly claimed that the commission, which is bipartisan, is being unfair to him even though its rules apply equally to both candidates and the terms of the events were negotiated with both campaigns.
Instead, the commission announced a different change.
The 90-minute debate will be broken up into six 15-minute segments, each with a different topic. The commission said it will give Trump and Biden two minutes apiece to speak uninterrupted at the start of each segment. A period of "open discussion" will follow until the next segment begins.
Trump's campaign has repeatedly opposed the idea of granting the moderator the power to shut off a candidate's microphone -- an idea that was floated in the aftermath of the first debate, during which Trump repeatedly interrupted and jeered Biden.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey and Felicia Sonmez of The Washington Post; by Frances Robles and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; and by Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, Will Weissert, Jonathan Lemire and Brian Slodysko of The Associated Press.