This week provided a case study of typical Leftmedia obfuscation to smear President Donald Trump. It started with a CNN interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci. He was asked a hypothetical setup question by Jake Tapper — whether more lives would be saved if the social distancing had started earlier.

The answer was obviously “yes,” but unfortunately Fauci did not know he was being set up. “It’s very difficult to go back and say that,” he responded. “Obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. … But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated, but you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different, but there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

CNN and the rest of the Demo/Leftmedia consortium then spent the next 24 hours insisting Fauci blamed President Trump for dereliction of duty and letting people die.

Eventually, Fauci set the record straight: “I was asked a hypothetical question and hypothetical questions sometimes can get you into some difficulty. … The nature of the hypothetical question was if in fact we had mitigated earlier could lives have been saved, and the answer … [is] if mitigation works and you initiate it earlier, you will probably have saved more lives. If you initiated it later, you probably would have lost more lives.”

But as to the question of Trump being at fault, Fauci said that his answer was “taken as a way that maybe somehow something was at fault here.” In other words, taken out of context to spin it.

Fauci put that to rest: “The first and only time that Dr. [Deborah] Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a, quote, ‘shutdown’ in the sense of not really [a] shutdown, but to really have strong mitigation … the president listened and went to the mitigation. The second time that I went with Dr. Birx into the president and said 15 days are not enough, we need to go 30 days … at that time the president went with the health recommendations and we extended it another 30 days.”

He further stated regarding difficult recommendations he and Birx made to the president: “The travel was another recommendation when we went in and said we probably should be doing that, and the answer was yes. And then another time it was we should do it with Europe, and the answer was yes, and the next time we should do it with the UK, and the answer was yes.”

As for Fauci’s regular appearances on CNN, Trump is right — he should decline.