THE TOXIC FIDGET QUEEN VILLIFIES DR. FAUCI

Dr. Lillian Glass

 One of the latest additions to the MAGA Fauci pile-on is bestselling psychological spin doctor Lillian Glass. You might recall Glass as the “self-help” pundit who allegedly invented the term “toxic people”—the title of her first worldwide bestseller back in the nineties—and as the self-styled “Queen of Communications” whose claim to fame is supposedly being able to tell you everything there is to know about a person just by how they blink their eyes, cross their legs, smile, frown, sweat or scratch their…whatever.

MAGA has apparently enlisted Dr. Glass (yes, she does have a PhD, but not, as it turns out, in psychology) to do a very public hatchet job on Dr. Fauci. She is doing it in articles and also on podcasts—on Newsmax among other places.

Speaking of Newsmax, I saw an interview she did there. They came to her home. My first impression was that, for a supposed expert on body language, you would think she would be better at controlling her own.

During that apparently uncut interview, at one point a dog comes into the room and starts barking at the strangers. The camera remains on Glass but you hear the dog barking. Glass suddenly grows very tense, seems to lose track of what the interviewer is asking her, tightens her upper lip (wonder what that means?) and shouts “No!” at the dog out the side of her mouth.

The dog keeps yapping and Glass gets increasingly agitated and distracted. At one point she leans forward, upper lip still tight across her front teeth, and appears to pick an item up from an invisible table in front of her—we’re only seeing her from the chest up. Whatever it is—we can’t see her hand—her shoulder shows that she has side-armed at the dog.

Then suddenly, interrupting the interviewer, she shouts at someone else in the house to come get the dog. By then, I’d pretty much lost interest in the interview—the body language (her body language) portion had been fascinating—because from there on it was a litany of  alleged “tells” that she claimed Fauci had, and which she interpreted as proof positive that he was guilty as sin of whatever he was being accused of, and was being deceptive about it. Innocent until proven guilty…unless you fidget.

Perhaps before I engage in any further analysis of Dr. Glass’s “expertise” and motives, I should point out that she is really hard to take seriously, since, while throwing an honorable scientist like Dr. Fauci under the wheels of the MAGA deflection bus, she has described the body language of Donald Trump—arguably one of the most hostile, deceptive and insincere personalities in history—as “expressive, confident and affectionate,” noting that he has non-verbal style shifts from high-energy dominance to rare moments of strict control or vulnerability depending on the context.

Glass has opined that Trump is typically outspoken, open, and emotional in his body language during standard rallies, utilizing a wide range of vocal inflections. She sees this as positive high energy. Fact-checkers would say that it is hard to be “outspoken and open” when you are provably lying to the crowd with nearly every breath you take.

She has also claimed that Trump has “a controlled delivery” with an “evidence-driven demeanor”—perhaps it would seem so if all you are doing is looking at his tics and “tells”, and not listening to the  outrageous things he is saying that have no basis in fact. Dr. Glass has also extensively analyzed Trump’s handshakes, calling them intense signs of warmth, or as “hand hugs.” Other observers have described them as over the top, creepy, and a kind of arm wrestling to see who blinks first.

Where I can only agree with Glass is when she talks about his meetings with authoritarians like Xi Jinping. She interprets a sense of close proximity, back-pats, and smiles, and calls them “a mix of deliberate power moves and genuine mutual affection.” Bingo! Donald Trump does indeed love his autocrats and authoritarians. You won’t see him wasting any effusive love of this kind on democratic leaders.

Dr. Fauci during the Senate hearing

Compare these glowing views of the president’s body language traits with her scathing interpretation of Dr. Fauci’s discomfort before a Senate committee headed up by Rand Paul, a sworn enemy of his, and under hostile examination by other Republican conspiracy theorists. Her bias seemed to be showing when, in an interview, she talked about how open and sincere questioning by Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) had been, when, at one point, as you might recall, Moreno disrespectfully asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck he thought he was.” She might call that being open and sincere. I call it rude and inappropriate.

For her part, Lillian Glass interpreted all of Dr. Fauci’s “tells” as abjectly negative. The main thrust of her interpretation is that Dr. Fauci’s body language suggests “deception.” Glass points to signs of anxiety, facial expressions that she alleges reveal concealed emotions, the frequency of his blinking, swallowing or tightening of facial muscles. She claims Fauci’s posture during questioning became “defensive” (ya think?). That his voice changed under pressure—I keep remembering Glass with the dog. That his eye movements indicated discomfort. (He was, after all, being given the third degree by one of the GOP’s chief conspiracy theorists, who had the authority of the Senate behind him, no matter how outrageous his claims). That his smiles were “forced.” That his gestures signaled “evasiveness.” That his reactions to questions demonstrated “fear of exposure.” And that his exchanges with Rand Paul revealed “guilt rather than confidence.”

Just by looking at Dr. Fauci, Glass decided that he had “something to hide” regarding gain-of-function research, his congressional testimony, NIH funding of research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the true origins of COVID (which, so far, no one serious has been able to establish, but the spin doctor seems to have it all figured out). Graver still, in her media posts, she has explicitly described Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath” and a “megalomaniac and a narcissist”—terms more often employed by mental health specialists to describe Glass’s preferred Psychopath-in-Chief. 

Speech coach for the rich and famous

Furthermore, she is ill-equipped and hasn’t the credentials to make this call, since she is a body-language and behavioral analyst, not a psychoanalyst, and has never examined Dr. Fauci as a patient—nor could she. Indeed, her original training is more in the field of speech therapy and facial and cranial irregularities, specialties in which she skyrocketed to fame by setting up a Beverly Hills practice where she became the “king’s speech” coach to the rich and famous. So her saying this about Dr. Fauci is pretty much the same as any random person on the street calling him names.

Here’s the problem: The central weakness in Lillian Glass's criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci is that it attempts to transform inherently subjective observations about facial expressions and posture into proof of dishonesty while simultaneously adopting many of the political narratives promoted by Fauci's congressional critics. Whatever one thinks of Fauci's COVID-era decisions, body-language analysis is not evidence of deception, nor can it establish scientific misconduct. It is only slightly more than a party trick that can be interpreted in numerous ways. Proof of that is the fact that polygraphs—which depend on the body’s reactions to questioning— are inadmissible in courts of law because they are only scientifically considered to be fifty-four percent accurate at best, and open to interpretation depending on who is administering the test. Those odds aren’t much better than a coin toss.

Add to that the fact that Dr. Glass has made repeated public statements criticizing the handling of the COVID crisis by the team headed up by Dr. Fauci during the pandemic—a team, by the way, that received Presidential Commendations from then-President Trump for their “exceptional efforts” in combating the disease—and it is difficult to take her as being an “unbiased” observer.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. While Glass has always insisted that she is apolitical and that her body language interpretations are void of political prejudice, observers point out that her public comments on social media frequently lean into right-wing populist talking points, particularly regarding pandemic restrictions, cultural institutions, and public health officials. Glass has sharply and openly criticized standard public health measures, lockdowns, and Anthony Fauci personally, aligning closely with MAGA critiques of COVID-19 mandates. She has publicly called out celebrities like Julia Roberts for their praise of Fauci, framing it as a failure to recognize “toxic” (her favorite buzzword) institutional behavior.

While she avoids declaring whom she is voting for, her public commentary has frequently praised Trump’s cultural impact, while criticizing efforts to erase his name from historical venues. All of this while, as mentioned before, favorably characterizing Trump’s body language and delivery styles. She has, furthermore, routinely framed pandemic-era school closures, vaccine mandates, and masking rules as severe government overreach that destroyed businesses and personal lives, giving no credence to the idea of seeking to save lives through any means necessary in a once-in-a-century plague that nevertheless killed millions worldwide and a million in the US alone. The COVID pandemic was the kind of exceptional occurrence that, throughout history, has merited seemingly cruel general quarantines and exceptional public safety measures.

Communications experts claim that Glass’s insistence that her critiques are “not a political post” or partisan exercises, but rather objective assessments of human decency, communication, and systemic toxicity, ring hollow, since her choice of targets is predominantly liberal public figures or mainstream public health architects. This reveals no objectivity at all, but a consistently subjective anti-liberal, far-right populist alignment in spirit and practice.

Psychological and behavioral science professionals have long criticized Dr. Lillian Glass and similar high-profile self-help media commentators for promoting unproven body language “tells”. They point out that there is no empirical grounding for the concept of “toxic people”, and indicate that there are standing professional ethics rules that prohibit engaging in unsupported remote psychological analysis.

Many psychological and non-verbal communications researchers have, through their intensive studies, come to classify lie-detection through posture, eye movements, or touching the face as scientific misinformation or “junk science”. In all fairness, there are likely others, like Dr. Glass, who defend their stand with equal certainty. But empirical studies exist that tend to show that there is no single reliable non-verbal indicator or checklist of behaviors (such as micro-expressions or fidgeting—what Glass likes to call the “itchy-scratchies”—that proves a person is lying. Experts conclude that behavior depends on more than the “tells” of the moment, and relies heavily on individual baselines, cultural background, and individual context rather than any sort of universal “dictionary” of physical movement.

Some clinical psychologists have also specifically criticized the “toxic people” concept. These critics point out that terms like “toxic” or “toxicity” have no formal diagnostic utility or foundation in psychological science. They are usually, these experts say, an oversimplification in that they pigeonhole or label people as inherently toxic, which promotes a black-and-white view of human behavior that avoids addressing complex interpersonal dynamics or accountability. It tends to be a “feel-good” self-help gimmick that permits one or both parties in a relationship to lay all blame for the failure of that relationship on the other person by writing him or her off as “toxic”. That said, Dr. Glass’s body language star, Donald Trump, is clearly, in most of the world’s perception, and certainly in mine, for all it’s worth, the most toxic personality to reach global mega-power status since the eve of World War II.

Where Dr. Glass clearly falls through the cracks in professional ethics, however, is in her remote and un-credentialed analysis of Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath.”  Licensed mental health professionals are bound by ethical rules (such as the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule) forbidding the public diagnosis or psychological evaluation of public figures they have not personally examined. Media personalities like Dr. Glass who offer allegedly definitive psychological assessments of public figures like Dr. Fauci are in clear violation of this standard of empirical and clinical accountability.

But then again, since Dr. Glass is merely a bestselling, high-profile, self-help pundit rather than a mental health professional, perhaps the gold standard ethics of the psychiatric community do not apply. Instead, she is merely plying her millions of far-right fans with populist red meat that only has the subjective significance that she and her following want to give it, with no empirical evidence to prove it. And no apparent personal need on her part to be incumbered by the facts.

 

 

THE GOP’S OBSESSION WITH SLANDERING AN AMERICAN HERO

 

The latest witch-hunt led by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and a handful of GOP hangers-on against Dr. Anthony Fauci is a tragic and shameful travesty perpetrated against a man who, objectively speaking, can only be considered a scientific hero. The Stalinesque theater of the absurd created by Paul at the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee this past week is a source of shame for not only the Trump-hijacked Republican Party, but for the US as a whole. The mere fact that Rand Paul was able to get away with setting up this throwback to the days of McCarthyism is indicative of the abysmal level of persecutory weaponization to which the Legislative Branch has plummeted with the GOP in charge.

Dr. Fauci has long been the genius far-right anti-science Republicans love to hate. But no one has more fully represented the witch-hunt against him than Senator Paul. Fauci has become a perverse obsession for Paul, one that his powerful position in the GOP-led Congress has permitted him to pursue with utter impunity. This impunity, then, has allowed Paul to raise every sort of unsubstantiated claim imaginable against Dr. Fauci with no need whatsoever to provide convincing evidence of his wild exaggerations and accusations.

As the head of a Senate committee that enjoys the dangerously sweeping powers of Homeland Security, Paul has also been able to entertain his obsession by calling on Fauci to testify under oath, a situation in which his Senate authority has permitted him to not only rake Dr. Fauci over the coals himself, but also to invite other GOP science-deniers to pillory one of the nation’s top scientists during their cross examinations. And to do so in the rudest and least protocolar of ways. Like when Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno shockingly asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck” he thought he was.

In my own mind, I was thinking that someone with a heart and a brain should stand up and provide a ten-minute summary of who the incredible Dr. Fauci really was, and then say, “Senator, we now know who Dr. Fauci is. The question on the table now should be, who the fuck do you think you are?

Rand Paul

The exchange between Moreno and Fauci was ugly in itself but was made uglier by the fact that Chairman Paul—besides making public intimate entries in Dr. Fauci’s own personal diary, which had been subpoenaed—never bothered to call out Moreno for his language or for the disrespectful way in which he formulated the questions he put to Dr. Fauci during the Senate proceedings. All of this is indicative of the depths of parliamentary perversion to which the Senate GOP has fallen. Its most vitriolic representatives are carrying out a veritable inquisition against defenders of America’s finest traditions and natural enemies of the current regime.

Paul would later compound the vile injustice to which Dr. Fauci was being subjected when he had Fauci’s attorney physically removed from the room, when the lawyer sought to respond to a question put to his client, after advising Dr. Fauci to plead the Fifth Amendment considering that the head of the committee was clearly bent on persecuting him.

It is important to note that the target of Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is a top scientist, with a career spanning more than five decades, during which his scientific work and public service have contributed to saving millions of lives worldwide. Paul’s accusations surrounding Fauci stem entirely from the scientist’s work at the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the COVID-19 pandemic—the ham-handed mishandling of which by the Trump administration cost a million lives in the US alone.

The central issue here is not whether Dr. Fauci made mistakes—every public official managing a once-in-a-century novel pandemic is bound to—but whether the campaign against him has been proportional to the evidence. The historical record clearly demonstrates that it has not. More importantly, we should bear in mind whom we are talking about.

So, who is Anthony Fauci? Dr. Fauci's scientific career is virtually unmatched. A graduate of Cornell University’s medical school, where he was top in his class, Fauci was the longest-serving director of a US scientific agency in history, having headed up the NIAID from 1984 until 2022. In that role, he served as a scientific adviser to seven presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In recognition of that incredible service to the people of the United States, in 2008, then-President George W. Bush presented Dr. Fauci with the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for his determined and aggressive efforts to help others live longer and healthier lives.”

Fauci receives Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush

In a 1988 presidential debate Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush paid Fauci—then practically an unknown in the public eye—one of the highest compliments possible. When the debate moderator asked the elder Bush to name a person who should inspire young Americans as a modern-day hero, the former CIA director and future president didn’t name a sports figure or someone in the military. Instead, he said, “I think of Dr. Fauci—probably likely never heard of him. You did? He's a very fine research top doctor at National Institute of Health, working hard doing something about research on this disease of AIDS.” Clearly, Bush had his priorities straight. Men like Fauci were the true heroes of humanity.

Over the years, Fauci has been a visiting professor at innumerable medical centers, and has received numerous honorary doctorates from universities in the US and abroad.

A young Dr. Fauci with George H.W. Bush

The remarkable continuity of Dr. Fauci’s service under both Republican and Democratic administrations demonstrates that, for decades, he has been regarded primarily as a scientist rather than a political actor. It is only in the wake of the first Trump administration’s disastrous handling of the COVID pandemic that the GOP—and particularly Rand Paul—have sought to turn Dr. Fauci into a scapegoat for the one million COVID deaths that occurred on their watch. It should also be noted that Paul—a product of the Tea Party and its later iteration as MAGA—is basically a vaccine denier, who has campaigned for vaccines to be a choice rather than an obligation. He is, then, part of the problem in the trend toward the return of numerous deadly diseases that are today resurging as a result of ever-lower vaccination rates, after having been defeated through obligatory vaccination in my lifetime.

But as George H.W. Bush pointed out in his brief tribute, Dr. Fauci's greatest contribution predates COVID by decades. In the early 1980s, infection with the HIV virus was essentially a death sentence. Dr. Fauci became one of the world's leading researchers on HIV immunology and treatment. Among his major accomplishments in this field were: helping identify mechanisms by which HIV destroys the immune system; advancing clinical trials that produced effective antiviral therapies; promoting anti-retroviral therapy, and supporting a global HIV research infrastructure. His work directly helped shape scientific policies that eventually turned HIV from a fatal disease into a manageable chronic condition.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, Dr. Fauci also played an influential advisory role in the development of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR is widely regarded as one of the most successful humanitarian health initiatives ever undertaken. According to US government estimates, that program alone has saved more than 25 million lives. Of course, no serious historian attributes all of those lives saved solely to Dr. Fauci. But it is equally undeniable that he was among the principal scientific architects whose expertise helped make those live-saving achievements possible.

As if all of this weren’t enough, Fauci’s work has extended far beyond AIDS and COVID-19 research. He also directed major federal responses to SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, West Nile virus, anthrax and pandemic influenza. Under his leadership, the NIAID became one of the world's premier infectious disease research institutions. His published scientific work numbers more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers, making him one of the most cited biomedical researchers in history.

The Trump GOP has frequently accused Fauci of dishonesty. The record shows that this is a facile, self-serving reading of a complex reality. Throughout the  COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci repeatedly testified before Congress, participated in hundreds of press briefings, responded calmly and cogently to intentionally hostile questions for hours on end, and transparently released scientific data as it evolved. He openly acknowledged the fact that recommendations were fluid and would change as scientific knowledge regarding the novel virus evolved and changed.

His statement that early guidance on masks reflected concerns about preserving supplies for healthcare workers has been broadly criticized, but this was a logical priority within his purview as the head of national efforts to deal with a grave emergency that was overwhelming US medical facilities. And he, furthermore, publicly explained the rationale behind that priority rather than denying it. He reiterated endlessly that uncertainty existed regarding many aspects of COVID transmission, and he repeatedly emphasized that recommendations would evolve with the emergence of new scientific and medical evidence.

Changing advice during a novel pandemic is not in any sense evidence of deception. Rather, it was acknowledgement that new scientific information was being applied and adjusted as more was learned, even as the health authorities were struggling to cope with the pandemic in practical human terms. Such adjustments are not evidence of errors or of someone like Dr. Fauci “not knowing what he’s doing.” They are, instead, proof that scientific knowledge is developing and improving almost daily and that, on that basis, recommendations must also change and evolve in sympathy with those improvements.

No elected official has questioned Dr. Fauci’s motive more aggressively than Rand Paul. The Kentucky senator has repeatedly accused Fauci of lying to Congress, funding gain-of-function research, and responsibility for the pandemic. Yet repeated investigations—including both reviews by federal agencies and independent analyses—have never concluded that Dr. Fauci intentionally lied under oath. The question of how to classify certain aspects of coronavirus research has remained scientifically and legally disputed, but no court has ever found Dr. Fauci guilty of perjury or criminal misconduct.

In the absence of evidence of any wrongdoing on Fauci’s part, Paul’s repeated public accusations, then, function basically as a political red herring, aimed at taking the focus off of the Trump regime’s own disastrous handling of the pandemic, and as a distraction from other Trump failures, like his personal war in Iran, which is rejected by more than three-quarters of Americans polled.

The major boogey man in all of this has been Paul’s “gain-of-function” accusations. He has sought to make it sound like some sort of sinister plot on Fauci’s part to create a supervirus capable of wiping out a huge segment of the population. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to comprehend this, it is important to understand what gain-of-function is and how it works.

Gain-of-function refers to any genetic change that gives an organism a new ability or makes an existing ability stronger. This change can happen naturally through evolution or it can be induced by scientists in a lab. When gain-of-function happens naturally, it is because, over time, genes mutate, as a means of helping an organism survive. But gain-of-function can also be provoked intentionally in a lab, with the aim of learning more about how certain organisms work.

Gain-of-function is commonly used to help create medications, to improve crop yields, or to generate more useful bacteria. But its main use in the medical world is to help scientists better understand novel viruses and how they work, and then, ultimately, to create reliable vaccines to combat them. Clearly, these were activities in which Dr. Fauci was likely to be submersed daily during the pandemic, as scientists raced against the clock to discover a safe and effective COVID vaccine—a task they successfully carried out in record time in different parts of the world from Russia, to Britain, to the United States.

Where Rand Paul and other far-right anti-vax and MAGA actors have sought to hang their arguments are reports regarding the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated with an incident at the Wuhan research lab in China. Fauci was involved in American funding for experiments taking place there. A scientist of Fauci’s caliber and authority would, of course, be involved in research efforts worldwide, in seeking to find cures for highly infectious diseases. But from there to accusing Dr. Fauci of being the veritable architect of the pandemic and of intentionally seeking to cover up the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is the height of conspiracy-theory fabrication.

The origin of the COVID pandemic has never been adequately proven. Could it have been due to a leak from the Wuhan lab? Sure. This could have happened because of what is known as zoonotic spillover—in which, at some point, a virus might spread from animals to people—or it could have been due to some incident at the lab that no investigation has yet been able to determine. That’s not a conspiracy theory, but a legitimate scientific question that so far fruitless international efforts have sought to resolve.

But the problem comes when a subjective group motivated by political, personal or ideological leanings decides, based on no hard evidence whatsoever, that a mere theory should be taken as fact. The result is what is known as a conspiracy theory, and that is what is behind the continued persecution of one of America’s greatest medical heroes ever.  Despite the fact that there is still no conclusive evidence regarding the origin of the corona virus and the COVID pandemic, Rand Paul and his merry band of MAGA anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have decided that they are going to believe in the Wuhan leak theory and take it as fact. Very likely because it fits their obsession with vilifying Dr. Fauci, whose only arguable crime against humanity has been making every effort to keep spiteful, bitter people like Rand Paul from dying of some terrible disease.

The pitch that Rand Paul and company are trying to sell to the public is that, thanks to Dr. Fauci, US-funded research may have contributed to the pandemic. The argument is a real stretch, since the funding was granted for research aimed at improving the available means of combating dread diseases. If a problem at that lab was, in the end, somehow responsible for the spread of COVID—and again, there is no hard evidence that this is true—it was a tragic and unintentional consequence. To date, no investigation has established that the virus was either intentionally manufactured or released there.

The thing with conspiracy theories is that they have a lot in common with novel viruses like COVID-19. They have an uncanny ability to move and spread from one group to another. Float a claim in some radical online group, and before you know it, it has spread across the length and breadth of the social media universe. It is easy then, to posit that it is based on “well-known facts”—trust us, on this—and to turn it into a powerful political weapon.

And that is precisely where things stand today in the Soviet-style kangaroo-court hearings through which Dr. Fauci is being persecuted. So the biggest take-away from all of this is the question of how mere conspiracy theories can suddenly acquire a veneer of “authority” when pressed into service by bad government actors. 

Complicating the conspiracy theory, Rand Paul has presumed to portray himself as a medical professional of the same caliber as Dr. Fauci, and therefore, an authority worthy of opining on Fauci’s competency. Let’s look at the facts.

Paul indeed graduated from Duke Medical in 1988 specializing in ophthalmology. He finished his ophthalmology training at Duke University Hospital in 1993. That same year, he and his family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he started working in the private sector with the Downing McPeak Vision Centers and the Graves Gilbert Clinic. He later opened his own private practice in Bowling Green as an eye surgeon. 

At the turn of the century, the American Board of Ophthalmology modified its standards of practice, and required specialists in that field to recertify in order to keep their licenses to practice. Paul failed to comply with the recertification standards—whether because he was afraid he would not be able to meet them or maybe just out of bullheadedness—and his license to practice ophthalmology was revoked.

Instead of simply biting the bullet and taking the recertification examination, Rand Paul got together with a group of other disgruntled professionals and they started their very own rival certification board called the National Board  of Ophthamology. Paul was among the first to be recertified to practice medicine by this knock-off board, with other unlicensed medical school graduates following him in basically recertifying themselves to practice. Clearly, getting around the American Board of Ophthalmology recertification examination was the main purpose of the so-called National Board of Ophthalmology, because after Paul and company recertified themselves with the stroke of a pen, their organization waned in importance and was eventually dissolved.

Under that authority, Rand Paul practiced ophthalmology in Bowling Green until 2008, before launching his campaign for the US Senate in 2009. He won his Senate bid in November of 2010.

So let’s look comparatively at the professional performances of Dr. Paul and Dr. Fauci.

Rand Paul graduated from Duke Medical, practiced privately as an eye surgeon, lost his certification to do so, challenged the recertification standards of the medical board with oversight for his profession, started his own certification board and was recertified under his own authority, decided to run for the Senate, and won a seat. Since then, he has opposed obligatory vaccination for epidemic diseases, supported abolition of the Department of Education, opposed healthcare for all, and supported a free-market medical sector. He has also become—for reasons clear only to him and his MAGA base—the number one detractor of Dr. Anthony Fauci, vowing to put the scientist behind bars. He has spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and taxpayer funds going after Fauci for alleged criminal misconduct, based entirely on MAGA conspiracy theories that have never resulted in any criminal findings against Dr. Fauci.    

Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, has become one of the world's leading infectious disease specialists, spent more than fifty years conducting biomedical research, scored monumental achievements in major infectious disease control and prevention, advised presidents of both parties and been praised and rewarded by two presidents from Rand Paul’s own party, contributed to public health initiatives that have saved tens of millions of lives, transformed the lives of HIV-AIDS victims worldwide, and published more than a thousand scholarly papers that have served as gold standard guidance for broad sectors of the medical profession.

Former President Obama joins Dr. Fauci at a school event to
promote COVID vaccination programs during the pandemic

Paul has clearly devoted far more public attention to unreasonably attacking Fauci than to engaging with the broader scientific consensus on infectious disease and seeking to apply the proven science to making his constituents healthier.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is not infallible, nor does he pretend to be. He has acknowledged mistakes and changing guidance during the pandemic, which was an unprecedented public health emergency.

That said, Dr. Fauci should be judged not on the basis of conspiracy theories supported by the anti-science prejudice of the MAGA movement, but on his   half-century of scientific achievement and service to the American people. Measured over the course of that stellar career, Dr. Fauci stands as one of the most influential physician-scientists in modern American history. His leadership helped advance treatments for HIV/AIDS, strengthen preparedness against emerging infectious diseases, and guide public health responses under seven presidents from both political parties.

By contrast, Senator Rand Paul's sustained focus on portraying Dr. Fauci as personally culpable for the pandemic has not resulted in criminal convictions or judicial findings of misconduct of any sort with regard to Fauci. The obsessively nefarious anti-Fauci—and anti-science—campaign mounted by Paul is no more than a political scam designed to assign personal blame to a scapegoat for a complex global catastrophe in which Paul’s party bore a huge measure of responsibility by generating distrust in the science that sought to save lives, and encouraging Americans to “decide for themselves,” rather than strictly adhering to the science as it evolved and became ever more effective.

Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is simple MAGA deflection, and the Senator, taking his cue from the ghost of Eugene McCarthy, is bent on unjustly trashing Dr. Fauci’s extraordinary reputation as a means of stroking his own ego and of gaining points among his anti-science MAGA constituents.

HAS JD VANCE SEEN THE WRITING ON THE WALL?

 

Many opponents to the Trump regime have argued that even if, whether through impeachment or enactment of the twenty-fifth amendment, Donald Trump should be removed from office, Vice-President JD Vance would be just as bad or worse. In terms of the damage he could do, I don’t completely agree. Not because I think Vance is any more democratic than Trump, but rather because JD Vance is not Donald Trump.

He’s not a particularly popular person even in Republican circles—indeed polls tend to show he’s the most unpopular VP in history. As such, he would never get away with bullying Congress and the Supreme Court the way Trump does, and could never break the Constitution and federal laws daily like Trump does either, without being consistently called on it. My guess is the Trump dictatorship will end with Trump, whether by impeachment, removal for incompetence, completion of term, or act of God.

So it is not that Vance is any more presidential than Trump is. Indeed, Democratic Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock recently described Vance as “one of the most craven politicians on the American political scene.” The only reason, then, that a Vance presidency would be different from Trump’s is that JD Vance is a flagrant opportunist who, lacking Trump’s cultist backing, would have no choice but to more closely read political climates and appetites than his current boss does, and to act accordingly. And it appears he is currently doing just that, fearing that his own political ambitions for the future will, otherwise, die with the Trump regime, which, by all appearances, is sinking into a period of decline and agonization. 

But Vance’s pusillanimous nature, contrasting with his rank opportunism, have served him incredibly well. In 2011, Vance was a law student and political nobody. But while studying for his law degree at Yale, he attended a talk by billionaire German-American venture-capitalist Peter Thiel—who, since very recently, is holed-up with his family in Argentina, as a means of fleeing proposed taxes on billionaires in his former home of California, because he feels aligned with the radically libertarian ideology of Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, and because he sees the Southern Cone as  a remote future safe haven in which to hedge against

Vance pictured with mentor Thiel

global instability, the possibility of nuclear war, and artificial intelligence meltdowns in the Northern Hemisphere.

As an aside, having lived in Argentina for half a century myself, I think Thiel might be in for a major surprise when it comes to the instability question. Argentina has proven over recent decades to be one of the most politically and economically unstable countries anywhere. But then maybe impunity rather than stability was the word he was looking for.

Anyway, following that talk, Vance, against all odds,  managed to buttonhole Thiel, and to hit it off with the magnate. Vance seems to have impressed Thiel—perhaps with an ambition and lack of empathy to match the billionaire’s own—and in short order, Thiel took Vance under his wing and made him his mentee. It’s not like this was a something-for-nothing mentor-mentee relationship. Clearly, Thiel planned to turn Vance into his political Pygmalion, the kind of young and ambitious politician who would be willing to do anything necessary to get ahead that a libertarian tycoon could love. And that’s just what Thiel did.

Not-so-long story shorter, Thiel was the key financial architect behind Vance's rapid political ascent. He not only set Vance up in venture capital management from early on, but also later contributed an estimated fifteen million dollars to his protégé’s  2022 US Senate campaign in Vance’s native Ohio.

Thiel pictured with Trump sycophant and 
libertarian Argentine president Javier Milei

It has been widely reported that it was Thiel who encouraged Vance to write what became his massive bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, at the start of the Trump Era. It was with that book that JD Vance went from being a nobody to being a household name in his Ohio, and indeed in other parts of the US as well.

Thanks to that book, which provided Vance with a public persona (an albeit fake one, since Vance was not the Appalachian hillbilly he portrayed himself as but a middle-class Ohioan), and to Thiel’s deep pockets, that a best-selling author emerged from the political woodwork to burst onto the scene as an Ohio senatorial candidate. This was in the run-up to his 2022 win (by a six percent margin) over Democrat Tim Ryan, in the race for a seat left vacant by Ohio Republican incumbent Ron Portman, who was retiring.

Thiel’s tutelage largely molded Vance’s worldview. Thiel is a techno-libertarian with far-right populist ideas. Both he and Vance share a conviction that American elites have failed, and they have both pushed back actively against institutions like the mainstream media and universities. That and Thiel’s vouching for him made Vance the perfect choice for Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. So, with a scant two-year political career, JD Vance was suddenly the VP after Trump’s Grover-Cleveland-style election win, and the definitive breakup with his first VP, Mike Pence, whom he incited MAGA rioters to almost lynch during the J-6 Insurrection in 2021.

That said, the truth is that although JD Vance would probably do no more than Trump to protect democracy, his actions might be mitigated somewhat by virtue of the fact that, as I said before, he is JD Vance, not Donald Trump. But indeed, according to advances on the new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, about to be released by New York Times investigative reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathon Swan, it was Vance, during the ICE occupation of Minnesota, who took the nefarious Assistant Chief of Staff (and Trump Rasputin) Stephen Miller’s cue in passionately backing the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to that state to put down mass peaceful protests against the federal government invasion.  Note that, to date, Haberman and Swan have been so accurate in their reporting that the White House is now claiming that they could not have been so spot on about what went on in the Situation Room unless they had managed to record the sessions involved.

Three faces of US neo-fascism

Again, however, it is less often ideology that triggers Vance’s actions than it is opportunism. His plea for martial law could well have been no more than a ploy to win points with the nefarious Stephen Miller, who is the chief architect for Trump’s most neo-fascist policies.

Compare this to Vance’s public viewpoint in the two years that he was a senator, when he positioned himself as a never-Trumper, and went as far as to describe Trump as “America’s Hitler”. He would, of course, later seem to forget all about his aversion to Trump’s politics when his handler, Thiel, got him a shot at the VP slot.

Now, it would appear, he is repositioning himself once more, this time to be one of the first rats in line to abandon ship, as the Trump regime sails into ever stormier weather. His recent public behavior suggests a politician engaged in a familiar vice-presidential calculation. He is remaining outwardly loyal while gradually differentiating himself from a damaged president whose controversies, legal vulnerabilities, policy failures, and declining popularity will likely threaten the future ambitions of everyone closely associated with him. Perhaps the most significant differentiation to date is reporting that suggests his strong opposition to the war in Iran. So much so that one wonders if leaks to investigative reporters might have come from his camp.    

Whatever the case might be, some of his recent statements and actions have tended to demonstrate that Vance isn’t going as far as  seeking a public confrontation with Trump, but he is quietly but definitively seeking to put distance between himself and his boss—and, clearly, between himself and hardcore MAGA politicians as well.

Once again, advanced releases of excerpts from Haberman and Swan’s new book suggest that JD Vance has been adamant about a full release of the Epstein Files and transparency regarding the entire Epstein scandal. There were reportedly bitter arguments between Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Wiles is reported to have argued that the release of many of the files would be devastating for the president and needed to be covered up. Vance reportedly posited that everyone was already aware that Trump had been found civilly liable for sexual assault, that he had revealed that he grabbed women by the vagina and kissed them without their permission and got away with it because he was a star, and that he walked in on naked beauty queen contestants whenever he felt like it because he owned the pageant. According to Haberman and Swan, Vance pointed out that Trump had done all of this with political impunity. So how would the Epstein files make any difference? It would be worse, he argued, to be caught covering it up—something about which, so far, he has been right. But Trump reportedly agreed with Wiles and ordered the cover-up to continue.

Vance tells KC workers, "Vote against crazy."

Perhaps the most telling case of separating himself from Trump lately was a baffling statement he made to a crowd of workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing in Kansas City, Missouri. At one point in his stump speech, Vance said, “What I will ask you is, if you wanna make America great... if you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C.

If it hadn’t been an audience of cheering sycophants that he was addressing, the obvious question to ask would have been, “Wait a second, JD, aren’t you part of the ‘crazy leadership’ in Washington, DC?”  But maybe he figured since he was in KC and not, say, Washington, or New York, or even among his senatorial constituents in Cleveland, he could get away with it. And except for the independent liberal media that jumped on it with both feet, he may have been right, if that’s what he thought, because it seems to have been largely ignored by the corporate news outlets and even by Trump himself.

Perhaps it was just so off the wall that a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that he had simply misspoken. But if that was the case, it was one humongous Freudian slip.

But except for this particular incident, there seems to be no evidence of open rebellion on Vance’s part. Rather, he seems to be engaging in strategic hedging. It’s a strategy that doesn’t muster a great deal of scrutiny, since it is taking place in a regime in which contradictions are the norm. Trump contradicts himself from one year to the next, one month to the next, one day to the next, and, increasingly, from one hour to the next. Indeed, he will sometimes contradict himself from what he says at the start of a single sentence in a social media post before he reaches the end of that same sentence. Especially when he’s tossing out dozens of them, one after another, in the middle of the night.

As mentioned earlier, one area in which Vance is growing especially cautious is in foreign policy—particularly as regards US military intervention abroad. From the outset in his campaign for the vice-presidency, Vance bought into Trump’s prince-of-peace lie. Again and again Trump sought to portray the Democrats as hawks—ignoring the fact that the most prolonged war in US history began on a false premise entertained by a Republican administration. But Trump’s promise to voters was that he would not only not start any wars, but would also end ones that were already ongoing. He even went as far as to say he would halt Russia’s war against Ukraine “on day one.”.

Yet, early in the 2.0 phase of his regime, Trump, disappointed at not getting a Nobel Peace Prize—ignoring the fact that the solution of eight wars that he has repeatedly claimed to have been responsible for, appears to exist only in his head—carried out a rocket attack, apropos of nothing, on Venezuela and sent in commandos to kidnap the Venezuelan president and his wife and spirit them away to jail in New York. He then began threatening to invade Cuba and, finally, ordered attacks on Iran that have gone exceedingly badly for the United States and ended in a clearcut US retreat.

Historically, Vance built much of his national profile around skepticism toward this sort of foreign intervention. Yet Trump’s second administration has become increasingly entangled in military escalation.

In an interview back in February, Vance emphasized:

“I think we all prefer the diplomatic option.” He added, “There is no chance the United States will be involved in a drawn-out war.”

You could say, in twenty-twenty hindsight that this was wishful thinking. Unofficially, reports from within the White House suggest that Vance was vociferously against Trump’s war in Iran from the outset, agreeing with some of the top military officials that it was a disastrous idea. If the president thought a few bombing runs would bring Iran to its knees, he was mistaken. And if that wasn’t the plan, then the US would be in for another forever-war in the Middle East. In the end, however, Vance was in the minority in Trump’s yes-man (and woman) cabinet, and the US has since suffered a humiliating defeat and weakened its position on the world stage, with the senseless Wild West “diplomacy” of Trump and the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth taking the lead.

Vance’s language in public statements is, nevertheless,  politically revealing. Rather than fully embracing Trump’s aggressive posture, Vance has repeatedly framed himself as the administration figure emphasizing restraint — preserving his long-standing anti-interventionist credentials with populist conservatives. But then, as the Washington Post would point out, the VP didn’t have a lot of choice. Trump had put him, as the Post said, “in a bind, supporting a war that could cost him politically.” This couched public language was, then, the classic political language of insulation.

JD Vance is also separating himself from Donald Trump by engaging in appearances designed to broaden his image beyond simply being Trump’s lapdog. Perhaps the best example was, once again, that Missouri appearance before workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing, where he almost said the quiet part out loud: Dump Trump!

But a much more high-profile move was his decision to appear on a premier anti-Trump TV talk show, ABC’s The View. Earlier this week, Vance sat down with the co-hosts of The View, Joyce Behar, Whoopie Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Alyssa Fara Griffin and Ana Navarro, ostensibly to promote his new book, Communion touted as a return-to-faith work. The show is designed to be confrontational, and this, in that sense, was a typical interview. But unlike Trump’s appearances on even mildly opposition shows, in which he always ends up insulting the interviewer, calls their media fake news, stomps on mics and storms off the set, this one was completely civil. It was like a civilized debate in which the two sides agree to disagree but continue to discuss the issues anyway in a calm and collected fashion.

He did particularly well in separating his stance on the Epstein files from that of the Bondi and Blanche DOJ, which has done everything it could to cover the Epstein affair up. Vance’s response to this was to say more or less, “don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” but at the same time confirming that he wanted the files out there in full and in compliance with the law. He managed to elevate his figure above the fray, while still protecting his boss by pointing out that the Epstein transparency legislation was signed into law by Trump and that “Trump threw Epstein out” of Mar-a-Lago, and “reported him to the police,” for “being a creep.”

Navarro calls out Vance on Epstein

Ana Navarro pushed back saying the breakup between Trump and Epstein was over real estate, not pedophilia, but Vance insisted that the media always forgot that Trump reported Epstein to the police. When another host tried to interject something, he calmly said, “Wait, Ana made an important point and I’d like to answer it,”  thus defusing what could have turned into a he-said-she-said confrontation.

The tensest moment was when Whoopie Goldberg and Sunny Hostin double-teamed Vance, asking him to explain where black people fit into his administration’s vision for America. They grilled him over Trump’s systematic erasure of black history and black heroes, and Whoopie sought to get under his skin by reminding him that he should have a better understanding of what people of color go through in the US since he had “people of color in your family,” clearly referring to the VP’s East Indian wife, Usha, and their children. Vance danced around these questions, pretending he wasn’t sure what they were referring to, which obviously didn’t fly, but managing to make it through that segment without demonstrating anger or an open unwillingness to respond.

"You have people of color in your family."

It was clearly his weakest moment, but he kept it civil. At no point was he rude or short-tempered. Throughout, he fielded questions with relative calm, if not always believable responses. He also eschewed Trump’s mindless triumphalism and made it clear that there were a lot of campaign promises that the Trump camp had made and had so far failed to produce, but “we’re working on it.” The overall good interview in clearly hostile territory was sure to contrast Vance as a “rational, tolerant figure,” perhaps even “the adult in the room,” compared with Trump’s consistently irate, prevaricating and scandalous public appearances.

In short, The View provided Vance with a golden opportunity to present himself as independently electable, as seeking to normalize his image with moderates, and as atypically willing and able to engage with Americans beyond the MAGA media ecosystem.

Vance and family in India

This appearance was, in short, a major move in Vance’s personal brand construction. At the same time, he has subtly opened the door to a possible run for the presidency once the midterm elections are over.  Indeed, according to Forbes Magazine reporting, Vance has explicitly said, “I’ve thought about what that moment might look like after the midterm elections.”

Why does this matter? It matters because, once a vice-president begins planning a presidential campaign, his or her political incentives change. It means that JD Vance’s political interests no longer mesh perfectly with those of Donald Trump.

And as if a studied opportunist like Vance needed it, he has the example of Kamala Harris to refer to. Harris came very close to matching Trump in the popular vote in the 2024 presidential race, but not close enough to win. Among other reasons—and racist and misogynist considerations aside—as an incumbent VP, Harris remained loyal to her boss and friend, President Joe Biden, to the bitter end. It was an ethically laudable stance, but it was political suicide, since her campaign failed to make it clear that she was Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, and that she had a separate set of ideas and ambitions that had nothing to do with the administration she currently represented. This led much of the all-important independent vote to see her as “just more-of-the-same,” and thus to vote for Trump.

Now the situation is the same for Vance. Trump has become toxic and is highly unpopular, particularly among independents that gravitated away from Harris and toward him in 2024. Even many Republicans who have stood by Trump up to now are having their doubts because they realize how badly Trump’s regime is hurting people like them.

An indication of the climate Vance is living in was provided earlier this week by the ultra-conservative National Review, the famous publication founded in 1955 by the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.  Conservative anger was encapsulated in an editorial headline in the Review that read, The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles.  Carrying Andrew McCarthy’s byline, the piece was a scathing attack on Trump’s so-called Memorandum of Understanding with Iran to end a war Trump himself started and to open the Strait of Hormuz which was never closed before Trump began bombing Iran.

This is a major issue that Vance must be considering in his effort to de-align himself from Trump, since he must ask himself: Which Trump controversies could damage me? Which policies are or might become unpopular? And, more complex and more important still, how do I inherit the movement without inheriting all the Trump baggage?

Trump too is apparently seeing the writing on the wall in his relationship with Vance. As early as February of 2025, Trump publicly stated he did not necessarily view Vance as his successor. This was politically significant, since it made it clear to Vance from the outset that even if he swore loyalty and had Trump’s back, the president didn’t have his. Indeed, the president’s pick to succeed him could very well be someone like Don Jr., or some other more sycophantic choice who might allow Trump to still have a hand in setting policies of personal convenience.

Once Vance understood that Trump was unwilling to guarantee him succession, the rationale behind the VP’s political strategy (as an attentive student of Peter Thiel’s tactics) was sure to change. Why should Vance remain completely tied to Trump if Trump could well abandon him?

The Washington Post as early as April of this year said that Vance was, “Praising Trump while subtly differentiating himself.” And Bloomberg Government posited in a headline that, “Vance searches for fine line between (his) current role and (his) ambitions.”

The idea of a “fine line” reflects the balancing act Vance is currently performing in remaining loyal enough to retain MAGA support, but separating himself enough to politically survive a post-Trump future.

Donald Trump is eighty, and—at least according to the Constitution—cannot have another run, even if he were in condition to accept one, which he isn’t, since this is his second term.

But JD Vance is only half his boss’s age, and, at least in his mind, his political career is just beginning. Vance, then, apparently understands what many other vice-presidents with political ambitions before him have understood. Namely, that when a presidency begins to display a high level of toxicity, the only way to survive politically is to distance yourself from it. 

The evidence strongly suggests that Vance has foreseen the future, and knows that Trump is becoming more of a liability than an asset. The trick for Vance, then, is the one Kamala Harris’s ethical stricture forced her to ignore.That’s not a problem for an opportunist like Vance and he is already engaging in the long and incrementally gradual process of ensuring that when history judges the Era of Trump, it won’t judge the VP as inseparable from Trump’s enormous failures.