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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.
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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. (Because vaccines include a small dose of the virus to help humans build natural immunities, of course many people experienced short-term nausea, fatigue, or related complications after getting their shots.)
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.