Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the GOP hearings on Dr. Anthony Fauci, led by Senator Rand Paul. Why attack Dr. Fauci? It’s a useful distraction from pressing issues of this day: Trump’s flailing war on Iran; rising inflation; the Epstein files; cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

During the pandemic, Dr. Fauci was the voice of reason and the voice of science.

What were Republicans doing during the pandemic? Trump was their voice, and he told people to relax, COVID would simply disappear on its own. He suggested that people could protect themselves by injecting bleach or taking Ivermectin pills. He is as qualified to offer medical advice as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Trump deserves credit for investing in the development of a vaccine for COVID. Dr. Fauci oversaw the race to create an effective vaccine.

Once available, Dr. Fauci urged people to get the shot. Trump, instead of taking credit for the rapid production of the vaccine, allied himself with anti-Vaxxers. Be it noted, however, that Trump and his family received the vaccine.

In this post, Richardson wrote about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and the military quagmire in Iran, then wrote about the attacks on Dr. Fauci:

And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.

On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.

But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.

By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.

By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don’t bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I’m going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”

As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”

But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.

After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.

As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”

The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.

In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.

Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.

In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.

More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.

That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.

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