The first Trump and Biden administrations took lifesaving measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, they issued stimulus checks that allowed people to eat and pay their rent, which became the most successful public welfare initiative in half a century.
So how do you convince people that these policies never happened?
We were reminded of our answer last week: More lying, implied threat and the stochastic terror that comes with villainizing public servants as murderous traitors. In his first term, President Donald Trump gave former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci a medal for his handling of the pandemic. In his second, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and his GOP colleagues gave Fauci a grilling ostensibly on the administration’s behalf, looking for any answer sufficient to trigger a criminal investigation. Stymied by Fauci’s invocation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Paul & Co. found him in contempt of Congress by the simple expedient of ignoring the prerequisites for doing so.
That’s the legal part. For the loud, viral-baiting part, look to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aggressively lying to CNN’s Dana Bash about the early coronavirus death toll and its effect on health infrastructure. Or to Rep. Max Miller, who blasted his disgust with Fauci at levels you associate with a child actor using all 45 seconds of their screen time. That Miller did so hours before embarking on a media tour where he responded to credible abuse accusations as if reading from a Signs of Domestic Abuse checklist is the only thing keeping him from spending this week shrieking “At long last, has he no decency?!” to any radio show that’ll listen.
Like Shrödinger’s Plague, it’s been no threat or incredibly lethal to everyone.
Outside of the lies, the rest is nonsense . While GOP senators were beating their chests like apes, the Trump Food and Drug Administration was quietly approving a flu vaccine using the same mRNA technology about which “skepticism”” became the default posture. (Alert MAHA that the $ 500 million RFK cut from mRNA development isn’t coming back anytime soon.) While seven state bans were being floated just a year ago, performing skepticism is enough to substantiate the conservative paranoia de jour. Unfortunately, you can debunk the totality of conservative COVID-19 heterodoxy in three episodes of a buddy podcast . COVID-19 has always simultaneously existed as nonexistent, a trifle or a bioweapon engineered by China and/or the United States. Like Shrödinger’s Plague, it’s been no threat or incredibly lethal to everyone, or only to particular people, depending on what the observer needs to perceive to reach the pocket argument they showed up with.
Whether conservative COVID-19 arguments are credible or in agreement with each other has always been immaterial to the proposition that the thing they’re arguing against — government coming to the rescue in a matter of life and death and actually making your life better in the process — can’t be allowed to exist. Making that reality disappear is Job One, even if it means conservatives top out at sounding like an especially turgid late-season episode of “The X-Files.”
My friend David Roth wrote about this conservative tendency — significantly worsened by the pandemic — to reject the descriptive power of the outside world until one gives full consent. Until then, even a scintilla of doubt provides temporary injunctive relief from reality. COVID-19 is the biggest of the big lies, dwarfing even the Big Man’s claims to have won the 2020 election. Despite the Dolchstoßlegende utility of Donald Trump asserting that the election was stolen from him, its endurance owes everything to the shattered projections of an utter shit-for-brains incapable of psychologically processing loss. Most of the rest of the GOP did just fine, ready to move on by mid-November 2020 and keen to quicken the pace come Jan. 7, 2021.
COVID-19 remains an object of fixation because it laid everything bare. There is no disguising the core intent and beliefs of each party as the bodies piled up and morgue guests started having to sleep outside in the mobile home. At a moment when potentially more Americans than at probably any time in history were simultaneously as frightened as they’d ever been in their lives, one party told them very plainly that, if the choice was you staying alive or a little inconvenience, to be perfectly honest you might as well die.
The ceaseless pandemic lies — the lockdowns that never happened, the endless projection about authoritarian state interventions that are actually happening under Trump II as a perverted enforcement of racial public hygiene — don’t stand alone. Each comes with a supporting cast of nested crank industries, bespoke conservative diagnoses of pathologies extenuating from COVID-19 mitigation measures, placing the blame right where it belongs: on the victims and helpers. The seriousness of “actually, the vaccine was the COVID” climbs up and down the scale. The sloppy joe version is Alex Jones ranting about forcing Americans to be injected with rogue messenger RNA. The genteel one simply ticks the “invoke unintended consequences” bingo square of the rhetoric of reaction, replacing socioeconomic disease with biochemical vaccine side effects.
Notably, the go-to depredation for the respectable side — and for legacy media editors moonlighting at the D.C. sanewashing laundromat — focuses on childhood traumas and dislocation. It keeps things in the sweet spots of nebulous causation, difficult diagnosis and cheap emotional manipulation. Notably, too, the rhetorical framing of the COVID-19 side-effect discourse invariably requires Democrats, the media, public health experts or all three to repeatedly disprove assorted papers and cranks faulting school closures and COVID-19 mitigation measures for whichever new childhood anomaly emerges from a new look at some data. Anything, really, to keep the discussion from a much more dangerous proposition — namely, that perhaps the kids are a little fucked up because they had incredibly immediate and rational reasons to worry that they or their parents were in danger of dying, literally every day, and they had them for what is, on a child’s scale, a hauntingly long span of time. The redder your hands, the better it must feel to look at a distressed child and know, right then, just in your bones, that what caused it was trying to save him.
The sustained insistence of a party of crybullies.
Because as much as COVID-19 conspiracy and vaccine denial make for a decent payday for a few lucky personalities, the added COVID-19 layer of existential dread about their fellow man is a powerful motivation to keep safe under the big lie tent. Ultimately, there is no level of conservatism they can attain that puts them out of reach of service staff. There is no cordon of beefy ex-“operators” in shades who can immunize against others’ awareness that Republican lawmakers repeatedly thwarted measures that would make it harder for everyday people to die. Not even the highest ranking Republicans at the donor trough can approach a corner confident that the other side won’t bring them face to face with a doctor, mouth drawn down by umpteen pronouncements of death, silently certifying their guilt. The only exoneration left is that there wasn’t a crime in the first place — excepting, of course, their own in mirror image, attributed to their accusers.
That such claims constitute a load-bearing chunk of the party platform provides enormous help in this regard, even as Republicans obsessively revisit the crime scene and continually evince something like a serial killer’s narcissistic demand to be cleared of wrongdoing and credited with aiding the investigation. Endlessly relitigating the pandemic is a continuation of conservatism’s one idea by other means. Everything fits within it. The 12-year-old mentality and its need for attention. The class contempt paired with an expectation of gratitude. The lying, seething refusal to concede government, academic and scientific validity or utility of any kind. The eugenicist race science. Effacing any collective recognition of objective reality or beneficial governance is just part of the game plan, the base defense, the base offense, base everything, the biggest and most enduring lie.
When Republicans refuse to let go of the argument that up is down and that maybe the disease was the cure and that nothing killed your dad — when arguing against people’s memories of their own mortal terror is such a losing proposition — the repetition can’t help but feel especially urgent, even by GOP communications’ standards. It is the tedious reflex of a party of deeply corrupt predators, yes, but it’s also the sustained insistence of a party of crybullies who have spent years bleating that correctly assigning blame to them in public is a form of assault. It’s what you say when you know that, when the circumstances repeat, you will do the same thing again.
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