Liars and Loons

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

You know populism is having a good week when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t the most self-discrediting elitist spectacle of the past seven days.

 

That came on Wednesday, when COVID pope Anthony Fauci was hauled before a Senate committee to explain why some of his public statements during the pandemic didn’t jibe with the thoughts he recorded in the private diary he was keeping at the time. Modern congressional hearings unfailingly generate far more heat than light, and this was no exception. But the heat was enough to melt a meaningful chunk of what’s left of Fauci’s reputation.

 

On the advice of counsel, to avoid the risk of perjury charges that might arise from his testimony, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions no fewer than 111 times. A man who spent seemingly every waking moment of 2020 and 2021 chattering into microphones suddenly had nothing to say.

 

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

 

Just as embarrassing was the habit revealed by his diary of the doctor squeeing like a teenage TikTok influencer about how famous he was becoming during the pandemic, replete with name-checking the celebrities who had reached out to him. The eternal populist critique of the ruling class is that its highest priority is enhancing its own prestige, and now here was apparent confirmation in Fauci’s own words.

 

“Reading this, I truly worried about someone who would take a call from Dionne Warwick to talk about vaccines in a moment when the country really needed him to be a bit more focused,” The Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman sniffed of the diary entries.

 

And then, to round matters off, there was the matter of the blanket pardon Fauci received from Joe Biden during the final hours of the former president’s term. Biden would say that he did that to shield the doctor, a longtime MAGA hate object, from being unfairly harassed by a renegade Trump Justice Department. (A reasonable concern, to be sure.) But it had the effect of immunizing Fauci from any crimes he really did commit between 2014 and 2025—like, say, perjury in the testimony he gave to Congress during the pandemic.

 

So Fauci is untouchable legally—living proof that Trump and the right haven’t quite cornered the market on granting clemency to ideologically aligned cronies and shielding them from public accountability. Fauci will never need to explain whether he deliberately undersold the possibility that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab when, it turns out, he was privately agnostic about its genesis early on. Or whether his public skepticism of the lab-leak theory had to do with the fact that his own agency helped fund the Wuhan lab that was carrying out the sort of research that might plausibly have produced a Frankenvirus.

 

The political script here writes itself. You can’t trust the experts. They’re drunk on their own power and will lie to protect it. They care more about their own press than they do about your life. As I say, a good week for populism.

 

But not as good as it might have been.

 

No reckoning.

 

“It’s a real shame that the country cannot have an honest conversation, with the benefit of hindsight, about the many mistakes that were made six years ago,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial about yesterday’s dismal Fauci hearing. “America has never fully grappled with the causes and consequences of COVID.”

 

My editor made a similar point this morning. In the past, he noted, major national failures typically generated serious inquiries into finding out what went wrong. Sometimes, as with segregation, those inquiries were informal matters of cultural reflection and debate. But with acute episodic crises—the Kennedy assassination, September 11, Nixon-era abuses by federal intelligence agencies—Congress opened bipartisan fact-finding investigations that ended with recommendations for reform.

 

Not the pandemic, though. Even if Fauci had agreed to answer the committee’s questions, it’s hard to imagine yesterday’s hearing producing anything more illuminating than Republican members telling him that he belongs in prison and Democratic members asking him how it feels to be a hero. Why is that? Why can’t America do a fruitful, thoughtful examination of what everyone agrees was a mismanaged once-in-a-lifetime calamity?

 

The easy answer is that the same bitter hyperpartisanship that’s made presidential landslides a thing of the past has made earnest nonpartisan problem-solving a thing of the past too, at least in matters as intensely politicized as COVID. Consider this: Unlike with most major national failures, the two sides can’t even agree on what the failure during the pandemic was.

 

The Warren Commission probed the government’s failure to detect an assassin and to protect the president from him. The 9/11 Commission probed the government’s failure to sniff out and foil a terrorist plot. The Church Committee probed the government’s failure to keep intelligence bureaus from being turned against the public those bureaus were supposed to protect.

 

Which failure would a “COVID Commission” probe? The failure to limit transmission of a virus that ended up killing more than a million Americans? Or the failure involved in locking down schools and businesses and imposing mandates for masks and vaccines?

 

The divide over how America failed during COVID is less an ideological “disagreement” than it is a divorce. It’s why, to borrow a term my editor used, Fauci has become a “totem” of sorts for both sides. In a country where each party increasingly regards the other’s continued viability as a threat to the American experiment, politics is less a shared struggle toward national improvement than a battle for dominance to crush an incompatible worldview. Each worldview reflexively polarizes around sources of authority, and so Fauci became an angel to the left and a devil to the right.

 

That also explains why idiot socialists are still masking in 2026. It’s not because they’re terrified of COVID. It’s because they’re keen to signal their allegiance to a worldview in which the state is empowered to take draconian measures in the name of “safety”—as leftists define it, at least. Masks are totems too.

 

In my darker moments (which are most moments, admittedly), I’d go further and hypothesize that Americans aren’t clamoring for a “COVID Commission” because they simply no longer expect national problems to be addressed seriously, let alone solved. In May, Pew Research Center published a poll in which it asked respondents whether they thought the country’s best days are behind it or ahead of it. Across all parties and all races, majorities answered “behind.” An America that continually stumbles into wars it can’t win, that remorselessly amasses a national debt it knows it can’t sustain, and that twice elected a character like Donald Trump is plainly incapable of dealing conscientiously with challenges.

 

We’re in our “managed decline” phase as a nation, and most of us know it. So why go through the motions of pretending that a “COVID Commission” might be productive?

 

There’s another reason that a thoughtful bipartisan investigation into the pandemic is impossible, though. One of our two major parties is beholden to populists, and “populism” and “thoughtfulness” are basically a contradiction in terms.

 

The lesser evil.

 

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

 

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

 

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

 

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

 

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” Another Twitter user flagged a dispute between two populists, one insisting that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and the other insisting that the virus never existed, with the caption “the diversity of right-wing thought on display.” Those are the impulses that congressional Republicans somehow have to navigate.

 

How could they possibly conduct a serious pandemic investigation under the circumstances?

 

What about Ron DeSantis? you might say at this point. The governor of Florida is very much a populist, and he had a thoughtful COVID policy in the early days of the pandemic, back when Democrat Andrew Cuomo was seeding contagion in nursing homes across New York. DeSantis is the exception that proves the rule, though: Having boldly defied the left-wing lockdown consensus and followed the facts initially, he began meekly pandering to right-wing anti-vax paranoia as he prepared to run for president in 2024. At last check he was busy pushing his state legislature to repeal certain vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

 

Not every Republican politician is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics.

 

The supreme tragicomic example is Trump, of course, who’s never been free to celebrate his momentous achievement in helping to bring the COVID mRNA vaccine to market during his first term. He spent months after leaving office in 2021 urging supporters to take the vaccine, only to discover that this is one matter in which their loyalty to him isn’t absolute. By 2024 he had stopped mentioning it altogether; “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he said, not a little resentfully, “because I’m a Republican.”

 

Two years on, though, he seems to have finally caught up with his own base. Reportedly, Trump approached Kennedy recently to ask why he wasn’t moving faster to reduce the number of childhood vaccinations recommended by the federal government. The president is now more eager than his fanatically anti-vax deputy to scale back immunizations. Once again, for emphasis: Take Fauci.

 

Brain worms.

 

Even thoughtful right-wing commentators, when writing about left-wing pandemic failures, rarely reckon seriously with the fact that they’re allied with a faction of witch-doctor lunatics who’d rather spend money studying whether ivermectin cures cancer than encouraging mRNA research.

 

In noting that, I don’t mean to imply that, because the right is crazy, it’s acceptable for Fauci to lie or for Democratic policymakers to take dictation from the teachers unions on opening schools. But if we’re going to critique the expert class usefully, with an eye to convincing readers to trust it less blindly, we should probably be more forthright about pointing out that the main alternative to Faucism in modern America has brain worms. Literally.

 

Nor should we excuse populist derangement over the pandemic as an understandable or even defensible reaction to the expert class’ deceptions. It’s doubtless true that Fauci’s deceit about masking and revisionism about herd immunity piqued skeptics’ mistrust in the science bureaucracy, but right-wing mania over COVID was already raging long before Fauci became an Enemy of the People. As early as April 2020, just a month after the virus began spreading aggressively, the FDA had to debunk the populist craze over hydroxychloroquine as a pseudo-folk remedy against it.

 

You can have Fauci telling “noble lies” about masks to try to protect the supply available to hospital workers, or you can have the president musing about bleach injections and his fans praising the magical healing powers of a deworming medication. Only a doomed, decadent country would put itself in a position of having to choose between the two, but if we do have to choose—and most right-wing critiques of Fauci implicitly invite us to do so—the choice is clear. “The experts are untrustworthy” does not rationalize brain-worms populism.

 

And that’s the only kind of populism there is in practice, I suspect. Even when it has valid grievances, even when it’s led by obviously intelligent figures like DeSantis, the intense pressure populism is under to affirm and ventilate the suspicions of its supporters—whether those suspicions are reasonable or not—will lead it inevitably toward crankery. To its own detriment.

 

It’s why DOGE, led by the richest man in history and driven by an obviously legitimate belief that government is too wasteful, ended up cutting federal programs so vindictively and indiscriminately that Elon Musk himself recently admitted that he’d gotten carried away. It’s why Trumpists, despite enjoying strong popular support for measures like mandatory voter ID, can’t resist framing calls for better election security in terms of ludicrously paranoid conspiracies to rig elections. Populism could and should win on those issues, just as it should win its case against Fauci.

 

But the brain worms always find their way in.

 

Maybe we’ll eventually see a form of it that’s better suited to governing responsibly. (Leftists might point to the New Deal or the Great Society as examples, although you can imagine what an anti-statist conservative like me thinks about that.) “Populism, but smart” is the implied warranty of J.D. Vance 2028; a brilliant Ivy-trained mind like his can deliver the sober, reality-based people power that skeptics are waiting to see, his fanboys would insist. Could be—but remember that the vice president has also “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” according to the White House chief of staff. Even in a brain as formidable as his, the worms are stirring.

 

I’ll believe “populism, but smart” when I see it. In its current incarnation the movement is a purely adversarial force, unequal to the challenge of governing effectively and not even very interested in doing so. It won’t pursue an inquiry like “What went wrong with COVID?” because it won’t risk having to reach conclusions that challenge the inviolable suspicions of its supporters. If populists were more intellectually honest and civically virtuous, Wednesday’s Fauci disaster would have been the first chapter in an earnest effort to improve America’s scientific bureaucracy. As it is, the book is closed.