Fauci agrees that it’s nice not having Trump ruining everything.

“One of the things that we’re going to do is to be completely transparent, open and honest,” Fauci told reporters [last week]. “If things go wrong, not point fingers, but to correct them. And to make everything we do be based on science and evidence.

“That was literally a conversation I had 15 minutes ago with the president, and he has said that multiple times.”

Asked if he would like to amend or clarify anything he said during the Trump presidency, Fauci insisted he had always been candid, noting wryly, “That’s why I got in trouble sometimes.”

…

At Thursday’s briefing, Fauci was asked how it feels to no longer have Trump looming over him. “Obviously, I don’t want to be going back over history but it’s very clear that there were things that were said – be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine [pushed as a treatment by Trump] and things like that – that really was uncomfortable because they were not based on scientific fact.

“I can tell you, I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn’t feel that you could actually say something and there wouldn’t be any repercussions about it. The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is and know that’s it, let the science speak, it is something of a liberating feeling.”

Something of an understatement.