Fauci’s Treatment at Republican Hands Retraumatizes Politico

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Covid-era retrospectives that Anthony Fauci’s congressional testimony (or lack thereof) inspired are not exclusive to the right. Politico, too, reflected on the indignities that typified that grim period in American life. Indeed, Fauci’s treatment by the GOP reminded the outlet’s reporters of what they claimed many Americans resented most about the pandemic: the incivility.

 

“Rather than an evaluation of what went wrong and right, or how to do better next time, the rage stood out,” wrote the three reporters who bylined Politico’s roundabout defense of Fauci’s professional integrity.

 

“Republicans said it was about accountability; Democrats a vendetta,” the dispatch continued. “The nasty divide, which historians have said tracks that of prior pandemics, underscores the challenge in hoping to do better when the next pandemic hits.”

 

Logically, then, if the “next pandemic” hits while Democrats are in charge, we will rerun America’s Covid experience. After all, how can we “do better” if we studiously avoid any critical retrospection on that period?

 

Sure, there was plenty of incivility to go around during the pandemic, but that hardly rates as a concern when compared with the pandemic’s myriad other outrages.

 

American schools were closed longer than anywhere else in the industrialized world — a policy that Fauci regularly advocated. The learning loss that a generation of students inherited from that disastrous and epidemiologically questionable policy will plague the country for years to come.

 

In the name of “equity,” pandemic-era relief schemes violated the fundamental rights of property owners and somehow convinced Biden administration officials to abrogate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

 

Religious liberties — the right to worship as well as freedom of conscience objections — were violated, and the federal judiciary spent much of its time beating back unconstitutional usurpations of power by the executive branch.

 

The pandemic represented a unique threat that compelled policymakers to experiment and innovate. Many of those experiments were valuable. Others weren’t. But those that weren’t hung around far longer than a rational evaluation of their merits would warrant.

 

As I wrote at the time, nearly 1,000 days into America’s pandemic experience, the number of inexplicable governmental interventions into private affairs seemed increasingly untethered to the threat still posed by Covid:

 

Vaccination cards are still currency in parts of blue America. Masking in almost every medical setting, up to and including veterinary offices, is standard. Performative displays of hygiene theater contribute to a rise in “behavioral” maladies such as hypochondria, even if they have few other measurable effects on our environment. Colleges and universities maintain Covid-testing regimens that conflict with their education.

 

According to the researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz, “Many people still say they feel more anxious, emotionally exhausted or socially disconnected than they did before 2020” — a “lingering” effect of “prolonged pandemic stress” that can “reshape both brain and immune system function over time.”

 

It’s a miracle that many people aren’t psychologically tortured by their experience during the pandemic. The incivility that Fauci experienced from Congress on Wednesday objectively pales before a cursory audit of the era’s many affronts to individual liberty. A thorough accounting of that period would be an elementary act of civic hygiene. And, yes, there is still some residual “rage” — understandably so.

 

Either Politico’s reporters experienced none of this, or they cannot bring themselves to make any concessions to a version of our shared reality that conservatives would recognize. That may be an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable piece of reporting, but it’s no excuse.