Trump claimed he did a 'great job' with COVID and said the only thing Dr. Deborah Birx did well was scarves, book says

• Dr. Deborah Birx previously said thousands of deaths from COVID-19 could have been mitigated.
• Trump responded, saying he "did a great job with the pandemic," a new book says.

Donald Trump didn't take too kindly to criticisms from his former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and instead took a jab at the doctor, according to a new book.

After Birx said in TV interviews and to congressional investigators last year that thousands of deaths during the pandemic "could have been mitigated or decreased substantially" once the US surpassed the first 100,000 deaths in May 2020, Trump rejected the statement and suggested his response was infallible, journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their new book, "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

"I did a great job with the pandemic," the former president said in an interview with the authors.

Trump also stated he never respected Birx, the authors wrote, and said, "The only thing she did well was scarves," referencing Birx's go-to fashion piece in press briefings and other public appearances.

The scarves were so ubiquitous that an Instagram page, called "deborahbirxscarves," was dedicated to the doctor's fashion accessory and amassed over 33,000 followers.

Birx wasn't the only person in Trump's orbit who was ignored when it came to the former president's response to the pandemic.

Melania Trump also urged her husband to take the pandemic seriously, the book says.

"'You're blowing this,' she recalled telling her husband," according to the book. "'This is serious. It's going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you're taking it.' He had just dismissed her. 'You worry too much,' she remembered him saying. 'Forget it.'"