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Good morning,

So, after all that, Dr. Fauci pleads the Fifth yesterday and avoids doing battle with Rand Paul and his fellow grandstanders on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, who came into that hearing looking practically engorged with the opportunity to dress this old man down. Can't say I blame the doctor for not wanting to take part in these senators’ campaign ads. Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, etc. spent the hearing all but frothing at the mouth, speaking to Fauci as though he was evil incarnate while he repeatedly invoked his right not to answer their questions. At one point, Moreno said: "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

Who the f— do you think you are, senator? I would have walked out right then. How dare you talk to a public servant like that from the senate dais. I'm not even a big defender of Fauci, but that really pissed me off. Whatever you think of Fauci's role in the pandemic response, he dedicated his entire life to toiling in the unsexy world of public health policy. He was on the ground fighting AIDS when Republicans were pretending it didn't exist. Put some respect on his name.

It's fascinating what a lightning rod Fauci remains in the national consciousness. My inbox yesterday was split about 70/30, basically between people who tsk-tsked me for not defending him enough... and those who think he should die in prison. How does this little Italian grandpa become a national Rorschach test like that?

Here's the thing that drives me up the wall when we do this armchair quarterbacking of the pandemic. This might be news to some people, but DONALD TRUMP WAS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WHEN COVID HAPPENED. All this fury that so many conservatives have about that period in our lives — much of it totally valid! — why is it never directed at the man who was actually running point? The man who was in charge of the federal disaster response? Why do they let him skate on everything?

Covid? Blame the top infectious disease doctor, not the president. Lose the election to half-dead Joe Biden on account of your guy's incompetence in said response? Call it rigged and refuse to accept the loss. The dumbest members of your coalition sack the Capitol after the president whips them into a frenzy and then vanishes? Call it a peaceful protest and the people arrested for beating up cops "hostages." It’s all such loser behavior.

The most infuriating thing about Trump isn't even the out-in-the-open corruption to me. It's how he never accepts blame for anything, and his own supporters do these mental gymnastics that let him get away with everything. We're so far from Truman and “The Buck Stops Here” it's not even funny. Your beef with Fauci is actually a beef with Trump, who comported himself so poorly and incompetently in responding to a novel respiratory virus — at one point floating the idea of injecting bleach into your veins to fight it — that the country, so starved for any kind of leadership, ended up falling in love with people like Tony Fauci and Andrew Cuomo. LOL! That's on you, Don.

If Fauci was so bad, so conniving and evil, why didn't Trump fire him? Why was Fauci responsible for the lockdowns, which were implemented at the state level? On the school closures — which basically everyone now acknowledges were a disaster — why didn't Trump use his bully pulpit to fight the teacher's unions on that? Talk about a meatball down the middle for a GOP administration! No, it must be someone else's fault. Everything is always someone else's fault with Trump and MAGA.

One other thing while we're on the topic. More of a clarification, really. Yesterday I wrote that once we knew Covid was airborne, we should have dispensed with non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing. I should have added some nuance to that because some of you were confused. Once a virus is airborne, isn't that exactly when you should implement social distancing? The stuff we were told to do like staying six feet apart and wearing non-N95 masks became irrelevant when we found out that Covid was spreading via microscopic aerosols and not so-called "ballistic droplets." The latter can theoretically be slowed by interventions like social distancing because the droplets fall out of your mouth to the ground right away. But when those droplets are aerosolized, they spread like cigarette smoke and don't abide by a "six feet" rule. Which is why you were getting these superspreader events, where one infected person in a closed space like a movie theater or restaurant was able to infect so many others even if they were on the other side of the room. And there isn't a whole lot you can do about that, unfortunately, short of locking yourself in your basement all day. Which many of us did anyway, to disastrous results.

My recollection is they discovered Covid was spread via aerosol sometime around May or June 2020, and that is the point at which the public health response should have flipped on a dime into something like this:

NOTICE TO ALL AMERICANS: The COVID-19 virus is in the air everywhere in the country. You will get it, if you haven't already. The fact is that you cannot avoid respiratory viruses. You might be able to slow or delay that exposure via extreme measures like lockdowns, but that is a tool we will use only as a "spot" intervention in places where the hospitals are being overwhelmed. Otherwise, go about your life knowing that you will be infected by this virus. Covid is not like an STD, which you can avoid fairly easily if you use common sense. We humans do this thing called breathing, which we need to survive. We also tend to do it in close quarters with other humans, on account of us being social creatures. What that means is there is very little you can do to protect yourself from a highly infectious virus being spread by aerosolized droplets. Once you are infected, we'll offer the full resources of the federal government to help you. But now that we know how this thing spreads, there is no avoiding it. The sooner we all come to terms with that, the sooner we can move on with our lives. -END-

OK. Now I see why Fauci works so many people up. I think we all have a lot of untreated PTSD from that period, and he has just become the scapegoat for all of that national trauma we're working through. I actually woke up intending to talk today about the Democrats, particularly a pair of primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan that are about to serve as a test of whether this progressive insurgency can win in purple states. But we're heavy so I will table that convo for tomorrow.

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Carlo Versano is Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture. He has in-depth knowledge and experience covering a range of topics and stories over a 20-year career in the news business. Carlo joined Newsweek in 2024 after a stint at The Messenger. Before that, he was an Emmy-winning producer at NBC News. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the New School. You can get in touch with Carlo by emailing [email protected].

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By Tom O’Connor

A "surprise" Iranian missile salvo targeting U.S. bases in the Middle East amid a new White House pivot to diplomacy marks the latest test for the United States' dwindling munitions stockpiles.

That alone marks a major concern for President Donald Trump's administration as it oscillates between vows of war and peace.

As Carlo mentions, Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to answer questions during testimony on Capitol Hill about COVID-19, pleading the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times without responding to lawmakers’ questions.

Former President Joe Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon before leaving office. However, a pardon would not shield someone from prosecution for perjury if they lied under oath during subsequent testimony.

I spoke with several senators outside the hearing room during the testimony.

I asked Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who rarely speaks with the media, whether anything about Fauci’s testimony surprised him. He told me, “There wasn’t a surprise. I expect it was just gonna be a lot of theater on both sides overall.”

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall said he was not surprised Fauci pleaded the Fifth Amendment, arguing, “I think he agrees that that pardon is probably a fake pardon, and I think there’s no way he could counter Rand Paul’s arguments today.”

Watch all of my Q&As with senators here.

There are people who don't much care for polling stories, and the objection is fair enough: any single survey is a snapshot, the margin of error eats most of the drama, and the number will have moved by the time you finish reading about it. And then there are people who cannot stand them. President Donald Trump is one of them.

The latest string of polls gives him something to be sour about. An Economist/YouGov survey taken July 25 to 27 put his approval at 34 percent against 62 percent disapproval, the lowest mark he has recorded with that pollster in either term. Pew had him at the same 34 percent earlier in the month. The Washington Post and Ipsos found 37 percent. CBS News and YouGov found 39. Four pollsters, four different methodologies, one direction of travel.

The number I would be watching from inside the West Wing is not the topline but the independents, who sit at minus 53 net approval in the Economist poll. Republican support has barely budged near 90 percent all term, which means the movement is happening entirely among the voters who decide close House races. He was at 40 percent at this point in 2018, and Democrats flipped 41 seats that November.

The White House is unmoved. Spokesman Davis Ingle told me the real poll was Election Day 2024, and that Trump is working to cool inflation and make housing more affordable.

A little complication is that inflation actually did cool. June's consumer price index fell 0.4 percent from May, the steepest one-month decline in more than six years. But gas prices are back above $4.10 a gallon after the ceasefire with Iran collapsed again, and 60 percent of respondents say the war is costing too much.

Ladies and gentlemen of the American towns now being measured for server farms, transmission lines and windowless buildings full of humming machines: the cavalry is not coming. The data centers are.

So make them pay.

“We’re going to beat the fucking shit out of them”

— President Trump telling Fox News how he plans to retaliate against Iran’s “surprise” attack on US forces.

On this episode of The 1600, Carlo sits down with Georgetown professor Dr. Charles King to explore the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. They discuss what modern America can learn from Ancient Rome, examining its culture, political institutions, and the challenges facing democracy.

Watch the latest episode here. ⬅

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].