Citizens of all stripes have been “taking the Fifth” since 1876, when President Ulysses S. Grant cited the constitutional amendment (nobody “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”) in order to stonewall congressional foes who wanted to know why his New Jersey vacations were so lengthy.
But my favorite Fifth fellow is clearly the comic entertainer Zero Mostel.
Back in the 1950s, Zero wound up in the crosshairs of the right-wing red-baiters who ruined the lives and careers of countless Hollywood actors and writers. Summoned to Capitol Hill to answer questions about whether he’d known any communists or had known of anyone who’d known any communists, he stiffed them at the outset by refusing to even name the studio that employed him. He said, “18th Century Fox.” The show trial inquisitors asked, “Do you want that statement to stand?” He replied, “Make that 19th Century Fox.”
I thought fondly of Zero the other day when Anthony Fauci, an American hero who saved countless lives, was drafted for scapegoat duty by lightweight Senator Rand Paul, an eye doctor who’s not even certified by the American Board of Ophthalmology. That’s how it works in MAGA-land – people with scant expertise talking trash, smearing reputations, and wasting everyone’s time.
In a rational alternative universe, our federal government custodians would be looking ahead, preparing to fight future pandemics on the basis of science. But no. With Donald Trump’s poll numbers crashing, the MAGA goal is to shovel rancid red meat to the 33 percent of Americans who still think the deteriorating fraud waddles on water.
Pillorying Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert these last 40 years, is a handy way for MAGAts to ignore the deadly havoc they wrought during the worst months of the pandemic. One study concluded that if the population had been fully vaccinated by April 2022 (one year after the shot was widely introduced), roughly 319,000 deaths could have been prevented. Another study, in the medical journal Lancet, concluded in 2021 that Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic – his hostility to masks and science – “expedited the spread of Covid.” The result: roughly 188,000 unnecessary deaths on his watch.
But Rand Paul and the MAGAts don’t put stock in studies. It’s easier to just marinate in hate.
All this, despite the fact Trump himself, on the final day of his first term, awarded Fauci a Presidential Commendation for the latter’s work on the Covid vaccine. You may not know or remember that. Paul and the MAGAts have probably willed themselves to believe it never happened.
Fauci took the Fifth the other day because he had no interest in playing their game. As a result, hordes of dummies and ideologues fumed on cue.
We tend to like or dislike the Fifth depending on our opinions of those who invoke it. Most Americans probably concluded taking the Fifth was proof of guilt when a string of mobsters used it back in the 1950s and when Jimmy Hoffa’s corrupt Teamster cronies zipped their lips on his command. But Republicans defended the Fifth when Oliver North used it during Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, and Democrats defended the Fifth in 2017 when three of Hillary Clinton’s IT specialists invoked it during a congressional probe of her private server.
Trump excoriated that trio at the time: “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” He’d tweeted something similar in 2014: “If you are innocent, do not remain silent. You look guilty as hell!” Trump’s supplicants are saying that now about Fauci. MAGA Senator Josh Hawley said on Fox News that “Innocent people don’t hide behind the Fifth Amendment.”
A mere four years ago, when New York investigators sought to question Trump about financial fraud, he announced he would avail himself of “the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.” He then took the Fifth more than 400 times. And way back in 1990, when he was questioned about other women during his contentious divorce from first wife Ivana, he took the Fifth 97 times.
Surely we’d all be better off if Trump’s servile Congress were to hold hearings on the lessons we might learn from the current measles outbreak, the explosive diarrhea outbreak, and the downsizing of the CDC – anything at all that might help us prudently prepare for a future plague perhaps worse than Covid. But none of that will happen without a massive corrective from voters who can no longer abide a dystopia built on antipathy to science.
And only then would Fauci be freed to live in peace.
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]