Heroes like Anthony Fauci make Republicans look like criminals
So they tried to destroy his good name. That's the story.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci is a hero. Is he perfect? No. But despite his human flaws, he helped us get through a mass death event. A million died, but millions more would be dead had not Fauci and other public servants protected us against the covid. That makes him a hero in my book.
Yet yesterday, Dr. Fauci was summoned to Capitol Hill for questioning on more than 1,000 pages of private notes he had kept during the pandemic that were arranged to be released by US Senator Rand Paul and US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr.
The point was not holding a dedicated public servant to account for hard decisions made under difficult circumstances, but tearing down an honorable man, and therefore tearing down what little faith the American people still have in their government. It was disgusting.
You will probably see clips of Republican senators assailing the 85 year old with fantastic allegations, all of them arising from the fever-swamp of rightwing media. I am not going to recount them, because I am not going to dignify them. All of them are made in bad faith, because all of them intend to smear Fauci's reputation, in effect stealing the esteem and respect that are rightfully his. Every Senate Republican is alive in part thanks to Fauci, yet how do they repay him? With acts of perversion. They're trying to turn a hero into a villain.
Compounding the perversion is why. Why do the Republicans keep trying to shame Dr. Fauci? Because the real shame belongs to Donald Trump – and always will. The president refused to lead the country through the pandemic. He undermined the government's response, perhaps especially public understanding of the novel virus. His negligence led to a million more deaths than would otherwise have happened under competent leadership.
Though Trump sabotaged his own presidency, that's not the story the Republicans tell. Instead of a story of a deadbeat leader, their story is about an evil mastermind who duped the president with sinister plots, including conspiracies about Fauci's "invention" of the virus, which subsequently "forced" Americans to get vaccinated against it. The slander is such that millions of Fox viewers now believe, years later, that the man most responsible for saving their lives is actually the most responsible for the decimation of trust in government.
Sen. Roger Marshall: "Who didn't have a friend who took this vaccine and had some time of complication? A stroke, a blood clot, a young man getting some type of heart inflammation. That's what destroyed the trust in the American people for our government."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 29, 2026 at 8:09 AM
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Like I said, perversion.
These days, the lyrics are different but the tune is the same. The president has again sabotaged himself – but this time with even more villainy and corruption, causing untold hardship, suffering and death, here and abroad – and the Republicans are again scrambling for ways to obscure that fact by attacking anyone within arm's reach. Yesterday's hearing was about riling up the base in the hopes of mitigating the mounting backlash against them. (A recent YouGov poll found that Trump's approval among independent voters is -53 percent. It was -4 percent in the run up to the 2018 midterms. The Democrats won over 40 seats that year.) Rand Paul is now threatening to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of the Congress, because his party needs someone, anyone, to blame for Donald Trump's gangster presidency.
But while it was possible to say Trump was a victim of Fauci-related conspiracies in advance of the 2024 election, and therefore entitled to a second chance, such stories are no longer effective, even among Trump's most loyal supporters. In this, I think comments by Sean Strickland are illustrative. During a recent podcast, the UFC fighter, who moves in maga circles, said that something has shifted in the last year. His cited the Iran War and its economic fallout, but also Trump's heel-turn on the Epstein files. "Hardcore Republicans," he said, speak openly and frequently about feeling betrayed. The implication is that the climate has changed so much that Republicans feel safe expressing doubt to other Republicans. Even the power of white solidarity is not enough to stop dissent from within the ranks of maga.
UFC fighter Sean Strickland: It is kind of crazy how unpopular Trump is. Even hardcore Republicans are like, 'I feel fucking betrayed.' The people that have voted for you, that rallied around you—you actively just fucking spit in their fucking face.
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) July 28, 2026 at 1:19 PM
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Yet attributing fear of a midterm wipeout to the GOP's obscene slander of Fauci yesterday gives them too much credit. It would be one thing if he were, say, a Communist during the age of Joseph McCarthy, and the Republicans had decided to destroy his standing in polite society in order to score political points. But Fauci is not a Communist, nor does he display any discernible political ideology. He's a doctor who has dedicated his life, through multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican, to keeping Americans healthy, playing pivotal roles in the response of HIV, SARS, Ebola, the covid and others. As John Collins said, "why do they hate Dr. Fauci when the worst thing he ever did was try to keep them alive?"
Why? Because he's a good man.
I think that's an inescapable conclusion.
They cannot allow a good man to be venerated and valorized for his service to his country, as that would endanger attempts to normalize the Republican Party's gangsterism. No one can shrug in the face of theft and treachery when there are good men around who not only draw attention to the crimes but who make the criminals look weak and pathetic by comparison.
So yesterday, the Republicans put a good man on trial in the court of public opinion where he faced grotesque allegations – including one about profiting personally in the midst of mass death – but could not defend himself. Rand Paul hoped to trick him into perjuring himself, thus making it possible to be prosecuted despite being pardoned by Joe Biden. As a consequence, Fauci, citing the Fifth Amendment to every question, sat stone-faced while the Republicans assaulted him with lies, making him look guilty in the absence of a defense.
The Democrats on the Senate panel stood up for him, but make no mistake: It was not a moment of "deep political division." Nor was it merely evidence of the GOP's desperation before the midterms. It was a chapter in a larger story about good and evil, in which the Republicans thanked a hero for saving their lives by trying to destroy his good name.
It was disgusting.
Coda
Per TMZ's Twitter feed: "Harvey Levin calls the attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci 'one of the most heartbreaking things' he’s witnessed in government, comparing the push to jail him to the fear and persecution of the McCarthy era."
