“When I saw what happened in New York City,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci during a CNN interview that aired Sunday, “it was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ And that’s when it became very clear that the decision we made on January the 10th to go all out and develop a vaccine may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as the director of the institute.”

Who knew the diminutive doc was the Decider-in-Chief and the driving force behind Operation Warp Speed — the life-saving decision to strip away traditional barriers to vaccine development and thereby conceive, create, and begin administering multiple coronavirus vaccines in just nine months rather than the usual three to five years?

Why, it’s as if this guy Fauci is trying to take credit from this guy Biden, who’s trying to take credit from the man who actually delivered a vaccine in record time.

That man, of course, would be Donald Trump — and he doesn’t seem inclined to sit idly by while his two underlings attempt to create a version of history more pleasing to the ear of their new boss.

As Fox News reports, “Former President Donald Trump slammed Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx on Monday, accusing the infectious disease experts of ‘trying to reinvent history’ in televised interviews detailing their roles in combating the coronavirus pandemic. Trump spoke out after Fauci and Birx, who both served as key members of his administration’s coronavirus task force, were interviewed for a CNN special titled ‘COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out.’”

“Based on their interviews,” said Trump in a statement, “I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned. They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine.”

Trump then gave the two self-promoters a master’s course in self-promotion: “We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world,” he said. “We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression. Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before.”

Birx, who history might remember as the wearer of colorful scarves during Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force press briefings, said she had a “very difficult” phone call with the president after she spoke candidly about the severity of an outbreak last August. During the CNN interview, she said the COVID-19 death toll should have been much lower once an initial surge had subsided. “There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” she said. “All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

To this, Trump fired back: “Dr. Birx is a proven liar with very little credibility left.”

Trump then gave Birx and Fauci something to discuss the next time they have a quiet moment together. “Many of her recommendations were viewed as ‘pseudo-science,’” said the former president, “and Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room with her.”

As for Fauci, Trump says he was “incapable of pressing the FDA” to get a vaccine produced any more quickly. “I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this,” he said. “Dr. Fauci is also the king of ‘flip-flops’ and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible.”

In a mud-slinger like this, no one tends to come out looking good. But Donald Trump is at least used to it — five years of battling a vicious and deeply dishonest media have seen to that. He’s also entirely within his right to tell his side of the story — especially when it seems history is being rewritten before his eyes.