MAGA’s latest vendetta can't erase Trump’s massive failures: analysis

During most of Donald Trump's second presidency, Dr. Anthony Fauci's name appeared in few headlines. But on Thursday, August 6, the GOP-controlled Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to recommend a contempt of Congress charge for the former Biden administration health official after he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a recent hearing. And according to scathing analysis from Salon's Amanda Marcotte, the MAGA movement's vendetta against Fauci defies all logic and reason.

Over the years, Fauci, now 85, had very good relations with pre-Donald Trump GOP presidents — from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Yet many MAGA Republicans resent Fauci deeply for supporting restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed more than 1 million Americans.

"For people outside of Donald Trump's MAGA coalition," Marcotte argues in her August 10 article, "the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It's been more than five years since the COVID-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a 'mortal threat' to a 'minor annoyance' for the vast majority of people. But that didn't stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky's Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci's tenure ended four years ago."

Marcotte emphasizes that although "most voters" in the United States "don't even want to think about the pandemic anymore," the "social media response to the Fauci hearing showed that one group of people wishes it could be 2020 all over again: MAGA diehards."

"For normal people, yearning for a time when we were socially isolated and afraid of dying from a highly contagious virus is downright bizarre," Marcotte explains. "MAGA, though, has a reason to feel nostalgia for a pandemic that killed millions. It was an era when the GOP got to do what they love more than anything: play the victim as loudly as possible before huge audiences that were especially vulnerable to disinformation. The pandemic was a painful, scary time that many of us have tried to block out."

The Salon journalist continues, "But at the height of the pandemic, the right found both unity and energy by denying the seriousness of a virus that was, at its height, killing thousands of people a day…. This was the era of angry white people going into grocery stores unmasked, so they could film themselves throwing tantrums when the underpaid, scared clerks asked them to follow the rules. It was a moment when evangelical preachers, always hungry for proof that Christians are facing persecution, claimed it was a violation of religious freedom when they were asked to obey the same bans and restrictions on large indoor gatherings as everyone else. When a vaccine was finally released that offered protection against the deadliest version of the disease, MAGA was unwilling to give up a pandemic that was clearly serving their political purposes."

But MAGA's vendetta against Fauci, Marcotte argues, won't erase Trump's weak approval ratings in poll after poll.

"Between the Iran war and a faltering economy," Marcotte writes, "Trump's presidency is failing, and his approval ratings are in the toilet…. By reviving the harassment campaign against Fauci, the GOP has inadvertently revealed the time they long to return to: an era that is remembered by most people as miserable and deadly."