This is the July 30, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Yesterday’s wretched performance by Senate Republicans was the latest attempt by members of a political cult to avert Americans’ eyes from the real perpetrators of Covid lies: President Donald Trump and his spineless minions in Congress.
In January 2020, while his own intelligence community was already sounding alarms, Trump told Americans the virus was “one person coming in from China. We have it totally under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
In February, weeks after White House staff warned the virus could imperil millions of American lives, he promised it would disappear “like a miracle.”
In March, he told worried senators to “just stay calm. It will go away.”
And in April — while makeshift morgues lined the streets outside New York City hospitals — this president was on live television talking about injecting bleach.
1.2 million Americans died. Yesterday, not a word from Senate Republicans about the president who repeatedly lied to the country about the danger they faced.
Instead, Rand Paul and his colleagues spent the hearing cherry-picking Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diaries, posing for cameras, screaming vulgarities at a man who spent a career trying to save American lives.
There are real questions about this pandemic that still need answers — about its origins, about miscalculations made across government. But starting a hearing by promising jail time for the man best positioned to provide them is the last way to get there.
It’s hypocritical. It’s shameful. It’s grotesque.
CHART OF THE DAY
WHAT THEY SAID
David Drucker on Iran
“The president never asked for buy-in from Republicans or Democrats on the Hill. Now they want to bring the focus back to economic concerns to survive the midterm elections. But they’re like a pinball — just being sent this way and that.”
Marc Morial on the “State of Black America” report
“Coalition politics has always been essential to the progress of Black Americans. We need a new Voting Rights Act. We have to find a way to undo the damage the Supreme Court has done — it’s become a corrupt political body. The policies of the last 18 months have been devastating, and people are in a fighting mood.”
Dave Wasserman on redistricting efforts
“The congressional map favors Republicans in all but the bluest of years. But while Democrats are still the favorites this cycle, they’ll have to gerrymander aggressively in the states they control to hold the majority in 2028.”
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