Can Birx keep her balance on the Trump tightrope?
Which makes this public health expert a case study in the quixotic nature of preserving both one’s position and one’s integrity in this White House.
Birx appeared in the beginning of the crisis to have it all — distinguished in her field, deft at navigating internal dust-ups and external debates, draped most days in an exquisite designer scarf from a seemingly inexhaustible collection. Yet whereas her colleague Anthony S. Fauci has managed routinely to win hosannas from both conservatives and committed progressives, Birx has now achieved precisely the opposite: starting the weekend with an explicit vote of no confidence from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who privately called her “the worst”) and ending it with a knock from the Oval Office.
Why? Birx confronts the almost impossible challenge of being both a scientist and a politico. And at the same time, she’s charged with explaining reality while working for someone who lives in his own warped little world.
Birx could hardly ever have been apolitical; she’s a political appointee. Her job always has been to serve the country and also serve the guy who keeps her around as an ambassador at large — and unfortunately, that guy tends to see a difference between the two. Even so, the deal she has struck between sticking to the science and saying what the administration wants to hear has at times looked one-sided.
Birx stood silent when Trump told this country’s citizens to inject bleach; later she said on Fox News that he was simply “digesting” some new information about the disease. She had previously praised these digestive abilities, claiming that a commander in chief who reportedly doesn’t even read his daily briefing book was a whiz at analyzing and integrating information, and “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data” to boot. She has soothed the president behind closed doors, too, by emphasizing the good and playing down the bad in rolling averages and death tolls — even when there has been more bad than good to go around.
This isn’t to say Birx has skirted the science entirely. She deserves credit for helping to persuade Trump to put into place shutdown guidelines and then extend them, and she has gently here and there corrected his manifestly incorrect statements. But by operating so obviously and so deliberately within our politics rather than outside them, she has lost allies among scientists and politicians alike. Many scientists disdain her for her disloyalty to the science; many liberals disdain her for her loyalty to the president; and the president values her so specifically for that loyalty that she ignites his ire by moving her toe even an inch away from the line.
Birx can’t claim the insurance of someone who commands complete trust from the public, or someone who enjoys universal appreciation among Washington elites. And as long as she’s seen as a person who acts politically in favor of Trump, she opens herself up to punishment for acting politically against him. Maybe the president was mad that Birx said the outbreak was so widespread it posed new dangers, but he was also mad because of something entirely unrelated to where his scientist came down on the science: her praise for Pelosi. Birx claimed she had “tremendous respect for the speaker” — which was simply too kind to a Trump nemesis for him to handle.
So the ever-composed Birx wobbles on a perilous tightrope. She is trying to be enough of a scientist that she stays credible compared to the loyalists who don’t know anything about science, and enough of a loyalist that she stays useful compared to the scientists who have little interest in being loyal. This is a tenuous gambit, and it will take a keen inner ear for her to maintain her balance.
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