Fox News reports Thursday morning that President Donald Trump, in a wide-ranging interview with Maria Bartiromo, said that the national reopening is tied more to political factors than to science or health.

When asked if he thinks his political opponents want him to keep the economy closed going into the presidential election, Trump said he does. “Yeah, I do. I do. I think it’s a political thing. The people that want to see the right thing happen, they agree with me. We have to get our country open,” Trump said. “You know, if it was up to some people let’s keep it closed for a long time…and watch the United States go down the tubes. Not gonna happen. Never gonna happen on my watch.”

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He also spoke directly about his relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the leaders, along with Dr. Deborah Birx, of his own White House virus task force. “So [Dr.] Anthony [Fauci] is a good person, a very good person – I’ve disagreed with him,” Trump said. We have to get the schools open, we have to get our country open, we have to open our country. Now we want to do it safely, but we also want to do it as quickly as possible, we can’t keep going on like this… You’re having bedlam already in the streets, you can’t do this. We have to get it open. I totally disagree with him on schools.”

In a tweet on Tuesday the president reiterated his position on the U.S. testing program.

The president also spoke of the effect of virus regulations on the young, “I think we have to open our schools, young people are very little affected by this [virus],” he said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci remotely testified to the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday and, though he has a different perspective than the president, failed to give Democrats the ammo they were looking for. “We should be humble about what we don’t know,” Fauci told Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), “And I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really got to be very careful, particularly when it comes to children. Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe.”

The president responded to Fauci: “He said I saved hundreds of thousands of lives, which is what happened. Everybody disagreed when I did that.”

Trump also nailed China, which apparently knew about the virus outbreak when it signed a trade deal with the U.S. in January. “I’m very disappointed in China, I will tell you, right now,” Trump said. “We have to open our country, we have no choice. You know people are dying this way too…they’re dying of this closure…where they’re in their house or their apartment…they’re not allowed to go out.”

The interview accomplished the president’s goal of getting his message out and genuinely having a disagreement with Fauci without opening up a chasm of difference between them that could be exploited by the Democrats for political gain.