By and
large, Capitol Hill and the media have moved on from last week’s Senate “hearing,”
if that’s the right word for it, featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci. But the
stench lingers over the questioning of an 85-year-old retired official who
dedicated nearly four decades to protecting the health of Americans. It
won’t dissipate any time soon.
What was
it that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HDGAC)
paraded before their constituents? A hearing? No. An interrogation? Only
slightly better. A witch-hunt? Nearer. A McCarthyite public burning? There you have it.
For the
past several years, committee head Rand Paul has claimed that Fauci, while director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), approved
research in China that could have produced COVID-19.
As the
hearing began, the Kentucky Senator urged the witness to “come clean” about
mistakes made early on—and, when Fauci on the advice of legal counsel exercised
his First Amendment rights, threatened him with “consequences” for obstructing the
“investigation.”
Aping
President Trump’s foul-mouthed antics and degradation of his office, Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio screamed “who the f— do you think you were” at Fauci, then had
the temerity to demand that the immunologist apologize—rather than having the grace
to do so himself.
As there
are virtually no GOP public officials, even down to the local level, ready to defy Trump, I expected this berserk performance from the Republican Senators.
In a way, it’s also probably part of the job description of members of the
nation’s fallaciously named “greatest deliberative body” to posture and
pontificate.
But I hoped for more from the nation’s media. Instead of examining how much truth actually
resided in the accusations that Fauci misled the country, they engaged in
tsk-tsking him for what they deemed insufficient humility and for shading the truth:
*Gal Beckerman’s
Atlantic summary of Fauci’s private notes was headlined, “The
Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci.”
*Wall
Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan compared his appearance to “congressional
hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is
fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to
incriminate himself.”
*Contrarian
commentator Andrew Sullivan, starting off by urging readers not to blame
Fauci for the coronavirus or the lockdown, concluded on a shrill rising note by
saying that they should hold him responsible for “protecting his own ass at all
times, stigmatizing those he disagreed with and basking in fame at champagne
parties as others died alone, gasping for breath, only to be denied a proper
funeral (like my own father).”
These and similar
commentators failed to recognize a variation on a longtime Trump theme—one that
should have struck close to home for them. The GOP HSGA committee members’
attempts to stigmatize Fauci parallel the President’s charges that the American
media represent “an enemy of the people.”
That
phrase, as several historians noted when the President began using it at the
start of his first term, echoed similar words popularized by Joseph Stalin
whose mere use, as successor Nikita Khrushchev said later, “made it unnecessary
that the ideological errors of a man be proven.”
The attempted
show trial of Fauci may have disheartened his supporters—and thrilled his
critics—but would hardly have surprised aficionados of classic theater.
More than
140 years before, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen had
anticipated a community squabble over a health and environmental crisis—and
the vulnerability of a medical professional who warns of the danger—in his
fiery satire, An Enemy of the People.
Ibsen’s
protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, blows the whistle on the contaminated water supply for his town's lucrative new baths, only to be foiled by vested interests who manipulate public opinion against him.
Unlike the
journalists who rolled their eyes or clutched their pearls over Fauci’s resort
to the Fifth Amendment or note about every celebrity praising his work, Ibsen
never lost perspective on the full humanity of his truth-speaking doctor.
For all
his idealism—and correctness about the spa—Stockmann is hardly
selfless, let alone saintly. He expects the town to greet him as a hero—and when
it turns on him instead, he denounces them all in increasingly vitriolic terms
that only alienate them further.
While hardly
embodying perfection, Stockmann demonstrates an integrity in sharp contrast to
his detractors. He pays a steep price for his unflinching honesty, as he loses
his job, his children are expelled from school, and his home is vandalized.
Since the
start of COVID-19, Fauci has been lambasted not just in his hometown, like
Stockmann, but nationwide. Even while heading the NIAID, he faced threats that became so frequent and alarming that he and his wife needed federal protection—a
security detail that Trump has since gracelessly withdrawn.
MAGAnauts
were quick to trace the assassination of Charlie Kirk to incendiary progressive
rhetoric. They might ask themselves whether claims that Fauci was, as new
movement member RFK Jr. claims, a “criminal” given to “lying about everything”
might produce similar results.
The
hypocrisy of such charges is rank, especially coming from legislators like
Paul, Moreno, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose self-regard during the Trump
Administration has increased even as their usefulness in exercising their
constitutional duty as a check on the President has radically declined.
Typical of
how—well, infectious—such talk might be was NFL quarterback Aaron
Rodgers, who demonstrated that the effects of his acknowledged three
concussions might be worse than thought when he called Fauci an “absolute
coward.”
If Rodgers
truly wants to see an “absolute coward,” he might want to view Feb. 28, 2020
footage of an election-fearing Trump, a month into the pandemic, assuring Americans that “One day,
it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
And if
Senator Paul wants anyone to “come clean,” he can start with himself and
explain why in March 2020, as the pandemic accelerated, he continued to work,
travel and use the Senate gym for nearly a week while awaiting COVID test
results that proved positive—forcing colleagues like Mitt Romney and Mike Lee to
self-quarantine.
The Fauci
browbeating in no way fulfilled any Congressional mandate to investigate, to
ascertain facts so appropriate legislation could be passed.
It’s not
just because it will be nearly impossible to discover the truth about conditions in China while that government tightly controls the flow of
information—a characteristic of an authoritarian regime being adopted at a
frantic pace by the Trump Administration.
Not, it’s
also because Congress in Trump II—and, arguably, earlier—is no longer capable,
and probably not interested, in enacting laws.
Instead, what
Americans witnessed last week was a blame game that will frighten away
exemplary medical professionals from entering the public health field lest
they, too, like Fauci, experience abuse, calls for their imprisonment, and
threats to their safety and that of their family members.
It is a
particularly shameful aspect of the Age of Trump that public health—like
sports, once thought to be a matter beyond politics, where Americans could
unite in a common concern—has become just another front in the culture wars.
Anyone who dares face a public aggrieved by job losses or deaths and inflamed
by misinformation will indeed prove, as Ibsen’s beleaguered hero maintained,
that “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”
(The image
accompanying this post, of Dr. Anthony Fauci attends a coronavirus update
briefing Tuesday, April 7, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of
the White House, is an official White House photo taken by Tia Dufour.)
