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Good morning,

I want to start by addressing how I ended yesterday's column, in which I wrote "Good riddance" to Lindsey Graham. As soon as I re-read that when it hit my inbox, I got that feeling in my stomach that's usually my brain telling me I went too far or said something in particularly poor taste. I really try not to be a divisive prick here, believe it or not. There's enough of those to go around in the media. But I don't always succeed and sometimes let my emotions get the best of me. I shouldn't write those words about anyone who died, period. It's just not helpful to the broader project of free and civil debate. So, I'm sorry to you guys, and — not that they'll ever see it — but I am sorry to the late senator's family, too. I'll do better.

Today, the big set piece down in DC will revolve around everyone's favorite doctor/Satan himself, depending on how you see him. Anthony Fauci is coming out of retirement to testify in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul. Fauci and Paul go way back, and not in a good way. Paul has been obsessed with Fauci for years now, and Fauci is both out of the government and protected by a Biden "pre-emptive pardon" so he doesn't really have anything to lose. Therefore, we can probably expect this testimony to go off the rails immediately.

Ahead of this, Paul's office has been releasing parts of Fauci's "diary" that he kept in the early days of the pandemic. It's not clear how Paul got his hands on that, but it seems that Fauci was taking notes for a potential memoir even as early as Jan/Feb 2020 when few of us were paying much attention to this so-called “Wuhan virus” going around China

I don't have the appetite to re-litigate the pandemic here. There were so many mistakes and bad policy decisions. I extend a lot of grace to people like Fauci and other public officials — even President Trump — in those early days, when nobody knew what we were dealing with and we were still calling it the "novel coronavirus." It's easy for us talking heads to point to various decisions that were made in the moment, with incomplete data, as poor decisions in hindsight. But that hasn't stopped elements of right-wing media from spending the last half-decade painting Fauci as the root of all evil. And he did make some big mistakes, including his famous "noble lie" about mask efficacy (intended to prevent a run on N95s when frontline workers hadn't secured them yet). But in the end he was just some civil servant trying to do the best in a fast-moving situation with incomplete information.

To be clear, some of these "diary" entries that Paul's office released do a good job making Fauci look bad. Or at least cringe. He seems overly preoccupied with his own image in those days, writing at one point: “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable." But if you're just some public health bureaucrat who all of a sudden is getting profiled in the New York Times and Washington Post, wouldn't that go to your head a bit, too?

The more newsworthy part of Fauci's writings — and the thing that Paul is trying to nail him on — is what he said about the origins of the virus back in those early days. On 1/26/20, Fauci wrote: “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."

The right has run with that as Fauci acknowledging the lab leak probability in private even as he publicly denied it. But that's not true. In the very next line of that diary entry, Fauci wrote: "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” So he obviously did not believe the lab leak theory in the moment, he just didn't think the wet market was the spillover event that everyone else did. He said as much in this USA Today interview on 2/17/20, three weeks later, which carries a different unfortunate quote of his as the headline: “Danger of getting coronavirus now is just minusculely low.” 

As I said, some amount of grace should be afforded to Fauci and the rest for those first few months of 2020. The worst decision that was made in that period came from Trump, who didn't shut down international air travel into the US until it was way too late. But the real original sin of our pandemic response was that we didn't adjust our policies based on how our knowledge of the virus was evolving in real-time. Once we knew it was airborne, all of the social distancing and surface-cleaning nonsense should have been thrown out the door. Once we knew it could be spread asymptomatically, we should have prioritized rapid at-home testing at the expense of everything else. Once we knew the virus was not very harmful to children in the aggregate, the schools should have been immediately re-opened – and Trump should have gone to war with the teacher unions over that.

You can go on and on. We did not shift our strategy as the data shifted, and the blame for that can be spread around. But in a national disaster/crisis scenario, the buck is supposed to stop with the president, and Trump was president that miserable year. He was literally the worst possible person to be running our national response. The worst public messenger you could have, managing the most complex public health crisis in history. He failed completely, and it ended up costing him that election even if he’ll never admit it.

Remember, the mantra in those early days was to "flatten the curve" or "slow the spread" to give hospitals the space to prepare and operate in places where cases were exploding. Sometime around that summer/fall, that totally reasonably strategy turned into this "zero Covid" extremism where we all became terrified of a virus with a .02% fatality rate. Who's to blame for that? I don't know, it morphed into a panic that was exacerbated by this new media ecosystem we live in where nobody believes anything and everyone's taking different advice. But I do know if we had a president at the time who was even remotely capable of being a unifying force he or she might have been able to transmit that message to the nation and overcome the hysteria and politicization.

Anyway, as Fauci and Paul go at it today, here's the real legacy of the pandemic. You can see it in this chart courtesy of the Associated Press.

This is the ballgame, people. Food prices up 30+% since Fauci was writing love notes to himself in his diary. That's not his fault. That's not even Trump's fault. But you simply cannot expect a country to go "back to normal" when prices have gone up by this much. (But nominal wages are up too over the same period, you say. So they tell us, but does anybody reading this feel like they have more purchasing power today than they did on 1/1/2020?)

What do you do about this problem? I don't know the answer to that, and it's arguably the most important political question in the world. Governments are falling because nobody knows what to do about it. It's the reason we're seeing these socialist candidates overperform in the primaries, it's the reason Trump was reelected, it's the reason behind everything. As we've talked about, short of intentionally crashing the global economy, it seems like a problem without a solution. It's bad for Republicans right now because they're in power, but it's not like Dems have any answers. They'll win the next election, and then they'll provide no solutions and get kicked out in the one after that.

Until somebody can come up with a solution to the problem of you feeling like you're constantly being ripped off the moment you step outside your house, it's hard to imagine our politics ever getting back to some kind of baseline normalcy.

But in the meantime, we’ll always have Tony Fauci to kick around.

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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 Shane Croucher

Anthony Fauci returns to Capitol Hill this morning to notch up another entry for his diary, which by now we have all had the opportunity—and pleasure—to read.

There are hundreds of pages of entries in which the world's most famous doctor—and perhaps America’s most divisive—sounds like a starstruck kid in awe of his own celebrity admirers. The diary and Fauci’s own unexpected celebrity arc reveal a political machine broken by its compulsion to manufacture heroes and villains, like a twisted Hollywood D.C.

President Donald Trump delivered a heartfelt and deeply personal eulogy at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral Tuesday at the Washington National Cathedral. I was there, and several moments stood out.

Among them was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who appeared to receive a warm welcome from many members of Trump’s Cabinet upon his arrival. I saw him engaged in a lengthy conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also spent time speaking with Netanyahu’s wife, Sara.

The funeral also drew an extraordinary number of high-level political figures, including senators from both parties.

One of the most emotional moments came during Fox News host Sean Hannity’s remarks. When he told Graham’s sister, “you were his life,” she placed her hand over her heart and appeared overcome with emotion.

Another touching moment came when Emillie Boggs Roberts, Graham’s niece spoke about how he was always worried about other people. She became emotional at times during her remarks, and members of the Graham family were seen shedding tears throughout the service.

Notably absent was First Lady Melania Trump. I reached out to the White House for comment about her absence, but officials declined to comment.

I stumbled upon Congressman Joe Wilson as he was leaving the Cathedral, and I asked him for his thoughts on the service. Watch here.

Two years to the day since Venezuelans went to the polls in the disputed July 28, 2024 election, I sat down with Henrique Capriles, twice a presidential candidate and now a National Assembly member, to talk about where the country stands six months into a U.S.-engineered transition.

Capriles gives Trump credit for something elections, sanctions and diplomacy never managed. "Venezuelans give President Trump credit for taking out Maduro. The truth is, with elections we couldn't get rid of Maduro," he told me. "The game was completely locked. And then Trump came in and did what he did." He calls it a gamble that paid off.

But he draws a hard line at the warmer notes lately coming out of Washington toward interim President Delcy Rodríguez, whom Trump has called "fantastic." Capriles isn't buying the sovereignty concerns critics have raised either, but he's also not entertaining any "51st state" talk.

"I don't believe this is some kind of viceroyalty, that we're going to become the 51st state," Capriles said. "I think that's rhetoric."

He also told me the whole operation might never have happened if Maduro had simply accepted defeat in 2024, and that the Rodríguez family, ruling Venezuela in Maduro's absence, are "closer to Maduro than to Chávez."

We got into the August 1 transition talks, María Corina Machado's absence from them, and how a devastating earthquake reshaped Venezuela's politics almost overnight. Check out the full conversation here.

Trump’s eulogy for Lindsey Graham turns a funeral into a reflection on a political class that treats death as the only exit.

"Virtually everyone liked Lindsey. Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. I have to be honest. I have to veer from this for a second."

— President Trump departing from his prepared remarks as he eulogized Lindsey Graham.

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. ⬅

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