Fauci, Biden, 2020, Obama: The GOP is Playing the Hits Because They’ve Got Nothing Else

Trump keeps taking trips down memory lane.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about the Democrats’ encouraging polling, big decision in Michigan, and yes – we know it’s two years away – what a 2028 platform might look like.

How are things looking on the other side of the fence?

That’s something Jess was thinking about as she records the audiobook for I Disagree. (Out September 15th, get your preorders in now!)

If you’ve been following what the Republicans have been up to this week, you’ve heard about Anthony Fauci, inflation under President Biden, the 2020 election, and even… *checks notes*… President Obama?

If that sounds like a blast from the past to you, you’re getting the message: the GOP wants to re-litigate the controversies of yesteryear because that’s a lot easier than making things better for the American people now.

Poll after poll, issue after issue: this GOP is losing badly.

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F-bombs for Fauci as voters grow skeptical of RFK’s agenda

It’s been just shy of four years since Dr. Anthony Fauci stepped down from his positions in the White House and NIAID. No problem for the Republican-led Senate, which spent three hours on Wednesday dragging his name through the mud in a hearing about his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sen. Rand Paul led the charge, saying Fauci had abused his power and lied to the American people for decades. Sen. Bernie Moreno raged at Fauci – literally – asking him “who the fuck do you think you were” over a story about a family who were arrested at a football game for refusing to wear masks.

(Fauci, of course, recommended mask mandates; he had no role in arresting anyone over refusing to comply with them.)

Let’s be clear: Fauci’s decisions during the crisis weren’t perfect. Hindsight is 20/20. But this is a man whose tireless pursuit of a vaccine helped save millions of lives and whose calm, dispassionate explanations and recommendations helped save millions more.

His record stands in stark contrast to that of RFK, Trump’s answer to Fauci, who is too busy hosting cooking shows to see how unpopular his agenda is.

RFK is underwater with voters by nine points, 54%-45%, in a recent Fox News survey. His anti-vaccine crusade is faring much worse: only about a third of voters favor eliminating vaccine requirements for public school children; a cornerstone of RFK’s agenda as health secretary.

At Trump’s rallies, it’s still Joe Biden’s fault that prices are high

President Trump has been back on the campaign trail in Georgia and Michigan, where Democrats must defend two high-profile Senate seats this year.

Georgia, in particular, looks like it’s staying in Democratic hands this year: a new AARP poll has Sen. Jon Ossoff up a whopping nine points against Republican Congressman Mike Collins, 52%-43%.

You’d think that would motivate Trump to address persistent inflation. It’s the single biggest electoral problem he has on his hands, with 88% of voters calling it a very serious or somewhat serious problem.

Trump has addressed inflation at both of those rallies. But take a guess on how he brings it up:

18 months ago, we inherited a catastrophe from Biden and from the radical left Democrats. They created the worst inflation in 48 years…

And how is it faring under Donald Trump?

We’ve brought down prices last week. It was announced that inflation’s gone down faster than at any time in the last six years.

Fact check: it’s not. It’s been hovering around 3-4% in recent months, around the same rate it was under the last two years of Biden’s presidency (it peaked at 9% in mid-2022).

Voters know the reason why inflation hasn’t moved is because of Trump’s tariffs and

his war with Iran, which have driven gas prices to more than $4 per gallon. They also know the president has no plan to end either.

The White House is doubling down on its 2020 interference claims

Trump’s primetime address about voting security, where he claimed China worked to influence the results of the 2020 election, landed like a thud after he delivered it two weeks ago.

Republicans seemed to move on from it almost immediately. The Washington Post reported that within days, Trump and GOP surrogates had “moved on” from the speech, while Senate and House candidates in competitive states were campaigning on anything-but-2020, from the economy to public safety.

Well, the White House didn’t move on. As CBS News reported last week, the Trump administration doubled down on its election interference allegations, asserting that it had information that China obtained “non-publicly available” information about voters, without specifying what information was obtained or from whom.

Voters haven’t been swayed by these efforts in the past. In April, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that less than a third of voters felt that the 2020 election was stolen.

And while support has been higher for election security reforms, like showing ID while voting, as we’ve discussed before, that’s a far cry from what Trump is proposing with the “SAVE” Act.

Even Obama is still on Trump’s mind

We’ve saved the best for last: Trump debuted a new nickname for former-former-President Obama this week.

Frankly, it’s not his best work.

In a post pressuring Senators Cornyn and Tillis to vote for Todd Blanche for Attorney General, Trump said that without their support, he’d “push hard” to bring back his “anti-weaponization” fund, a $1.8 billion fund for his allies that was unpopular even within Republican circles.

Trump still likes the idea because, in his words, someone needs to take care of “those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration.”

We’re not sure we even get it. O-bummer?

Whatever the nickname, voters like him a lot more than Trump. A recent CNN poll revealed that while Obama is viewed positively by 57% of Americans, only 34% had a favorable opinion of Trump.

The Obama insult is a small piece of this puzzle, but it says something. Here we are, two years into the second Trump administration, and the president is acting like it’s 2015.

Then again, when your approval rating is somewhere in the mid-30s and you haven’t got a path out of a war you started, maybe you’d be feeling nostalgic too.