“Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could've saved more lives,” former Nancy Pelosi challenger DeAnna Lorraine tweeted. “Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large. Time to #FireFauci...” Trump retweeted that message, adding “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up. Thank you @OANN.”

Of course, Fauci wasn’t talking about Trump’s decision to “ban China”—he was talking about the fact that Trump should have done more in those early days to stop the spread of the disease. If “banning China” (really banning travel by foreign nationals from China, while allowing 40,000 people to enter the U.S. from China) bought the U.S. any time to fight the pandemic, Trump then squandered that time, claiming that there was no problem. And despite the ample evidence—more than 555,000 cases and 22,000 deaths worth of evidence—that “banning China” did not stop the virus in the U.S., Trump continues to point to that one act as showing that he Did Something. So having Fauci on TV acknowledging that more should have been done is definitely not going to make him happy.

Fauci’s comments landed in the middle of a weekend Trump spent on the phone with the so-called friends and informal advisers whose advice so frequently bolsters his terrible decisions, as well as rage-tweeting things like “#FireFauci” and attacks on the media. Three sources told the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng that Trump repeatedly asked people “What do you think of Fauci?” and told one person that he’d made Fauci a “star” by including him in press briefings.

It’s always all about Donald Trump, even with 22,000 people dead—a number that will surely have risen by the end of the day. It’s about his personal grievances, his ego, his refusal to admit that he could have done anything wrong. And that’s why we are where we are.