It’s difficult to say whether Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. intended to clash with CNN’s Dana Bash during his latest appearance on “State of the Union,” but there was a reason the host characterized the interview as “contentious.”
Over the course of the on-air segment, Kennedy attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, accused CNN of vague misdeeds, peddled absurdities about the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines and, when pressed on preparations for future possible pandemics, prioritized individual liberties over public health.
But perhaps most notably, Kennedy appeared eager, if not desperate, to rewrite the recent past. In the secretary’s telling, it was Fauci’s fault that so many Americans were sickened by the contagion (which is absurd), it was federal officials who shut down businesses and government offices (it was actually state and local officials), and it was the United States that saw the world’s highest death rate from Covid.
When Bash tried to remind viewers of reality, Kennedy continued to insist that his misinformation was accurate. It was not.
The interview came just a few days after a mind-numbing Senate hearing in which Republican members also tried to rewrite the story of what transpired in 2020, recasting Fauci as the villain of the story.
The war on the recent past, however, is being fought on other fronts. Two days after the embarrassing Senate hearing, President Donald Trump insisted during a White House Cabinet meeting that Jan. 6 rioters really went to the U.S. Capitol as part of “an innocent journey.”
In case that weren’t quite enough, he said of the insurrectionists who launched an attack on democracy in his name, “There’s never been … a group of people treated so badly as these people.”
At the same gathering, referring to FBI agents who exercised a court-approved search warrant after Trump allegedly took classified materials and refused to give them back, the president whined, “They attacked my house, Mar-a-Lago, where I live.”
There was no such “attack,” Mar-a-Lago is a private business, not a “house,” and the last time I checked, the president lives in the White House (although Trump was not president when the search was executed).
Remember, all of these examples unfolded over the course of five days. My second book was about the Republican Party’s crusade to rewrite the recent past, and even I was a little taken aback by the ferocity of the GOP’s efforts in the last week.
A few months ago, Harper’s Magazine’s Scott Horton observed of the looming 2026 midterm elections, “The GOP campaign this fall will depend entirely on misremembering recent history.”
The relevance of that quote lingers.
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