Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before Sen. Rand Paul's committee on Wednesday morning and, for the first time in four decades and hundreds of congressional appearances, refused to answer a single question, outsmarting the smarty-pants Paul.
He invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. Good for him.
The melodramatic Paul even had one of Fauci's own lawyers physically removed from the hearing room.
After the hearing, the “I’m never wrong” and loathsome Paul was on camera promising a contempt vote next week and musing aloud about whether a presidential pardon can even shield Fauci from prosecution.
The hearing, if that's what you want to call it, was an absolute farce. Republican members of the committee took aim at Fauci personally. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno was especially offensive, firing expletives at Fauci in a performance that bordered on unhinged.
Paul said the hearing was about the origins of COVID. Almost none of the questions and accusations from the holier-than-thou GOP members had anything to do with that subject.
This sham of a hearing was never really about gain-of-function research. It was about Rand Paul getting in front of TV cameras to once again take shots at humiliating a retired scientist, physician, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient.
Paul just can't get over the fact that there is a more respected, thoughtful, and admired doctor in Washington than him. He simply cannot let it go. He has been chasing Fauci for six straight years.
And it's worth naming what this actually is.
It's Rand Paul's Big Lie.
Just as Donald Trump has spent six years insisting the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite dozens of court losses, audits, recounts, and investigations finding no evidence of widespread fraud capable of changing the outcome, Paul has spent six years insisting Anthony Fauci is a criminal mastermind who lied his way through a pandemic.
Both claims have been investigated to death. Both keep getting revived anyway, not because new evidence demands it, but because Trump and Republican leaders believe they still energize the MAGA base.
Trump's obsession with "they stole the election" is personal because he cannot stand losing. Republican leaders have long believed that resentment among voters drives turnout. So even now, Trump keeps trying to resurrect the 2020 election fraud narrative.
It doesn't matter that the claim has been litigated and rejected over and over again. Frankly, many Republican voters don't seem to care much anymore. They have more pressing concerns, like paying for groceries and gas, and being lied to by Trump — again — that he wouldn’t start useless wars.
Republicans are trying the same thing with Fauci, dangling him in front of the base as the villain who represents masks, lockdowns, and everything people hated about the pandemic.
They want voters to stay angry. But most Americans have more urgent concerns, and many people, regardless of party, don't want to relive one of the darkest periods of their lives. Most would rather talk about how to prepare for the next pandemic than endlessly rehash the last one, especially when so much of the conversation is built on distortion.
The truth is that Dr. Fauci was often the voice of reason when there wasn't much of one anywhere else in Washington. Donald Trump stood at the White House podium and mused about injecting bleach into the human body.
Was Fauci right about everything? No. Nobody was. It was a once-in-a-century pandemic, with scientific understanding evolving in real time. Fauci responded to the evidence as it developed and made recommendations based on what was known at the time.
Mistakes were inevitable. The lesson should be to learn from them, not scapegoat one person for an entire global pandemic.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic spent two years investigating the nation's response to COVID-19 and issued a final report intended to serve as a roadmap for Congress, the executive branch, and the private sector to prepare for future pandemics.
So what has the Trump administration done to prepare for the next one?
It has largely scaled back federal pandemic preparedness infrastructure by downsizing coordinating offices, moving to withdraw from international health organizations, and shifting attention away from many of the recommendations meant to strengthen future responses.
The administration is doing something similar with election security. Elections need protection, yet the Justice Department's election integrity capacity has been hollowed out.
Pandemics require preparation, yet HHS has spent the past year being gutted through mass layoffs, with roughly a quarter of its workforce eliminated at one point, cybersecurity and public health experts pushed out, and biodefense specialists warning that America is now less prepared for the next outbreak, not more.
Those are the real scandals.
Those are the hearings Congress should be holding.
Why is the administration ignoring the lessons of COVID instead of making sure we're ready for the next pandemic?
Why is Rand Paul more interested in what Dr. Fauci wrote in his personal diaries than in the life-threatening cuts this administration has made to America's pandemic preparedness?
Instead of strengthening the systems that failed us in 2020, Republicans are recycling a conspiracy theory about one man.
Rand Paul's crusade against Anthony Fauci has become his own version of the Big Lie: a story kept alive not because the facts support it, but because the GOP thinks vilifying Fauci is a winning strategy.
While Paul and Donald Trump keep looking backward for villains, the country grows less prepared for the next crisis, health or election-related — waiting just over the horizon.