REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN TRYING for five years to rewrite the history of Donald Trump’s two biggest moral crimes. One was his violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The other was his deadly mismanagement of COVID.

Since Trump returned to power, his party has fallen in line. It has echoed or acquiesced to his nutty tale of a “rigged election.” Republicans have defended or accepted his pardons of the January 6th felons, as well as his persecution of the public servants who investigated those felons.

Yesterday’s Senate hearing on COVID—which saw Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to COVID, subjected to hours of lies and insults—showed that the GOP has now fully embraced the other revisionist story: the one about the pandemic. In this twisted narrative, the villain isn’t Trump, China, or even the virus. It’s Fauci.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the second-ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, insisted that the COVID vaccines were “experimental gene therapy.” (They aren’t.) As evidence of their putative lethality, he cited a poll in which 24 percent of Americans supposedly claimed to know someone who had died from the vaccines. That’s 82 million people. Hiding such a colossal death toll would be, to put it politely, impossible.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), claimed that Fauci’s advice to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—or tens of thousands of people.” Paul referred to the elderly, making it clear that he was talking about Cuomo’s disastrous practice of sending infected patients back to nursing homes. Paul’s numbers were wildly off—the real death toll was about 6,400—and his attempt to blame Fauci was completely backward. Multiple reports found that Fauci had no role in the nursing-home policy. In fact, Fauci had recommended the opposite.

Paul accused Fauci of having denied the plausibility of the lab-leak theory, which holds that the COVID virus developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s not true, either: Fauci didn’t buy the theory, but he routinely said it was plausible. Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida repeated another Republican talking point: that Fauci’s change of advice on masks—first opposing their use in the general population, then encouraging it—was based only on the availability of masks, not on evidence that they worked. In reality, Fauci has consistently explained that such evidence was a major factor in his decision.

Meanwhile, Johnson spewed conspiracy theories. He suggested, with no apparent basis, that a pulmonary infarction suffered by Fauci in 2021 was caused by COVID booster shots. The senator also claimed that harm from the vaccines was vastly undercounted because a government “algorithm” systematically hid the evidence. But Johnson’s vigilance was selective: He dismissed the known risks and side effects of his favorite drug, hydroxychloroquine.

THE SENATORS’ CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT COVID intersected at some points with Republican conspiracy theories about