Relitigating Trump's old failures to distract from new ones
Republicans go all in on the politics of grievance.
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In modern Republican politics, there’s nothing more viral than grievance. That’s why last week they launched a grievance-fueled campaign to revise the history of the covid pandemic and publicly assault Dr. Anthony Fauci.
With the 2026 midterms three months away, the GOP does not want to talk about Donald Trump. His poll numbers are in the sewer, even on issues like immigration and the economy that carried him into office.
The party can’t brag about Trump’s “achievements” during the past 18 months because he has broken almost all of his major 2024 campaign promises: He failed to end the Israel-Gaza and Ukraine-Russia wars on Day 1, or cut home energy bills by 50 percent within a year, or deliver DOGE rebate and tariff windfall checks, or bring down the costs of groceries, gas, and healthcare. Meanwhile, he spends most of his time and fading energies either desecrating public spaces across Washington DC, plastering his name and image on everything, or enriching himself and his family.
To shift from electoral defense to offense, Republicans apparently believe that Americans struggling to pay their bills can be distracted from Trump’s second term failures by relitigating his biggest and most lethal first-term failure.
Grievance politics has served the party well in the past, especially in election season. Will angry, lie-filled spectacles like the Fauci hearing work this time?
Deathly denialism
Before answering that question, let’s first unpack some of the lies Republicans and their media allies spewed during the bizarre grilling of Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for his handling of the covid pandemic.
The vaccines did not kill nine million people, as the Senate’s dimmest light bulb, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, falsely declared.
Fauci didn’t kill seniors, as Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno claimed. Implying that complications from getting vaccinated were somehow worse than contracting covid itself, as Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall alleged, is a disingenuous and profoundly ignorant scare tactic.
In fact, there’s ample evidence the vaccines saved uncounted lives. Even if Republicans dare not say so publicly, privately they knew this truth during the pandemic because they acted accordingly: Trump and almost every major GOP politician got their shots and boosters. So did Fox News employees.
The vaccines were indisputably effective. During both the Delta and Omicron waves that followed vaccine availability, in places where Trump’s support was strong — and vaccination rates accordingly lower — the cases, hospitalizations, and death rates from covid transmission were significantly worse than in blue-leaning areas with much higher vaccination rates.
Literally and metaphorically, the deaths of citizens we know are the final piece of incontrovertible evidence the virus was real, lethal, and remediated by vaccination. I know of three people, including a former coworker and his brother, plus the brother of professional colleague, who died from covid before vaccines were developed that might have saved them.
The death of a high school classmate whom I’ll call “Kenny” is an even more compelling, if tragic bit of evidence of how vital vaccines are. Mutual friends from my hometown told me Kenny was a devout Trumper who lived long enough to witness the release of the covid vaccine, but refused to get the shot. In early 2022, almost a year after vaccines were available, Kenny contracted covid and died weeks later.
Perhaps Kenny suffered from co-morbidities; I don’t know. But if he did, that would be added reason to take the vaccine. Instead, Kenny chose to die from his devotion to Trump.
What’s most ironic about vaccine denialism, pandemic revisionism, and congressional Republicans’ sordid attacks on Fauci last week is that Trump claimed credit for speeding delivery of the vaccine via Operation Warp Speed. His supporters want to simultaneously hail Trump for solving a pandemic they somehow think was a hoax. Go figure.
Viral grievances
During the pandemic, influential and self-interested conservatives peddled covid skepticism and bogus medical alternatives despite knowing their statements might sicken or even kill some of their own supporters.
Sacrificing some voters and viewers to retain the rest is the bedrock tradeoff — call it a Fauci-an bargain in the case of covid — that undergirds the right-wing political and media business model.
Think of all the Americans, including tens of millions of Republican voters, who believe in science and therefore took the vaccine — or, worse, watched helplessly as a friend or relative who refused to vaccinate got sick or even died. And that’s not to mention the millions of those, regardless of partisanship, who survived contracting covid, before or after vaccines availability, but continue to suffer from long covid.
Yet here we are, five years later, and Republican leaders led by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul are telling those same Americans they were gullible dupes — victims of some government conspiracy the Republicans have invented.
The conspiracist strain of conservative grievance politics is itself viral: It spreads by producing a growing and thus increasingly profitable universe of clicks, eyeballs, subscribers, and followers. The best part for the conspiracy-peddlers is that, with the exception of the occasional Herman Cain, conservative elites and Republican politicians who inject their devotees with the grievance virus are mostly immune to the harms they create for others.
Anthony Fauci provides an ideal target for these right-wing fabulists and anti-science conspiracists. He looks the part of the easily mocked egghead: a small, somewhat nerdy expert with glasses and a soft voice. His demeanor contrasts sharply with the performative, defiant, hyper-masculine bluster Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth routinely displays during his congressional appearances.
So it’s hardly surprising that MAHA types reflexively trust kooks like RFK Jr. over real health experts like Fauci, whose public service career was hailed by both Bush presidents (and even Trump at the end of his first term). Even less surprising was the stunt congressional Republicans staged by inviting Laura Ingraham and other conservative media figures to stand during the hearings and demand that Fauci turn around and apologize to them.
Why Fauci, why now?
What political-electoral value do Republicans find in relitigating the pandemic now, years after the virus was contained through vaccines? The cynical answer is that the midterms are coming and the GOP needs diversions to change the national conversation.
Like any successful virus, grievance politics cannot kill its host before it jumps to its next victim. That’s how political pandemics spread. But will this latest mutation of the grievance virus save Republicans from electoral harm this November?
Surely the most conspiratorial-minded MAGAs and MAHAs — those who believe the pandemic was caused by an intentional lab leak, all designed to sink Trump’s 2020 reelection bid — will never vote Democratic in 2026. But Republicans rightly worry that key members of their base, increasingly frustrated by Trump’s failed promises, will stay home. Republican electoral enthusiasm levels are frighteningly low, and the Democrats enjoy a sustained advantage in generic ballot polls.
Republicans’ bizarre interrogation of Anthony Fauci last week shows that the GOP has no winning campaign messages to offer voters this midterm cycle. They’re already casting aspersions on imaginary communists, warning Americans about nonexistent impositions of Sharia law, and fear-mongering over threats purportedly posed by trans people. The Fauci hearings are similarly contrived.
The Republican Party may not govern well, nor ever pass a balanced budget. But they’re experts at grievance politics because they know that fueling anger and conspiracism is viral and can be politically useful. Expect more such spectacles between now and November.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that the covid vaccine does not contain a live virus.
That’s it for today
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Trump and the GOP dimbulbs like Tuberville seem to think that Trump created the COVID mRNA vaccine. Two traditional vaccines were emergency-approved 10 months after the pandemic started in China and spread globally. Seventeen months later, the first-ever mRNA vaccine was rushed into production for national vaccinations. It was highly effective and jumpstarted research into mRNA technology for treating other diseases and conditions. Tony Fauci was involved in that process all along. One might say his involvement was key to ensuring that sound science indicated safety as well as effectiveness to merit emergency FDA approval.
Trump's role in promoting new medications for epidemics has consisted mostly of bragging and taking personal credit. When re-elected, he quickly began to disrupt all NIH research with a freeze on grant money, and then brutal personnel and budget cutbacks for grants. Does that sound like Trump gives a darn about public health? Of course he does. Why else would he appoint a road-kill-eating non-PhD/MD, who promotes baseless vaccination phobias, to head HHS? Does any of this make sense to anybody with normal critical reasoning abilities? Hardly. It is demented if not insane.
The Covid vaccine (and other vaccines) do NOT contain live virus. The reaction some people have to vaccines is caused by their immune systems. Your statement is misleading and dangerous.