“One of the new things in this administration is if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess, just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters at the White House on Thursday. He also stressed to journalists during that White House briefing that when he told them about how certain matters had markedly improved after Trump left office, he definitely “wasn’t joking!”

And as Biden’s predecessor watched on—albeit from hundreds of miles away from where he last week sat at the height of executive power—he reacted in a fit of grievance, self-obsession, TV hate-watching that largely defined his presidency and now-defunct policy-making operations.

Fauci’s re-emergence on prime-time television during the Biden era infuriated the exiled Trump, who began whining about how “incompetent” the doctor was, and how he probably should have fired Fauci when he had the chance, a source close to the former president and another individual familiar with the matter tell The Daily Beast. (Technically, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a career federal employee.)