Ogres on Pikes: Americans Embrace the Politics of Decapitation

Jeff Robbins on Aug 4, 2026

Anyone looking for an actual liar about COVID-19 shouldn't be eyeing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who spent 50 years protecting the public health and earning every accolade he got. If Republicans wanted to highlight bona fide lying about COVID, the guy they'd haul in for questioning would be the president, because unlike Fauci, President Donald Trump lied nonstop about COVID. He was a virtual mendacity machine.

A tiny sampling:

On Feb. 20, 2020, as the first of a million Americans were dying from COVID, Trump said there was nothing to worry about. "It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear." It never has.

On March 6, 2020, when Americans were experiencing severe shortages of COVID tests, he lied baldly: "Anyone that needs a test, gets a test. They're there. They have the tests."

On March 19, 2020, Trump told America that the FDA had approved the anti-malarial drug chloroquine to treat COVID. "They've gone through the approval process," he said. "It's been approved." This was false.

On July 4, 2020, he proclaimed: "90% of (COVID cases) are totally harmless." But in fact, 15% to 20% of such cases required hospitalization, and innumerable cases did long-term organ damage. It was a "hoax," no worse than "a common cold," he lied to Americans, while telling journalist Bob Woodward that it was "tough stuff." "I wanted to always play it down," he told Woodward. "I still like to play it down."

A GOP-run hearing on Trump's dishonesty will happen not when pigs fly, but when they circumnavigate the planet.

Senator Rand Paul's Senate Committee's abuse of Fauci last week was Joe McCarthy on steroids, a perfect exemplar of what demagoguery looks like. Paul sounded like the sneering, bullying Wisconsin Senator when, after he threatened to criminally prosecute Fauci (For what? Recommending the wearing of masks?), Fauci naturally asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, and Paul doubled down. "There will be repercussions for your refusal to testify today," Paul blustered.

Sure, let's bully an 85-year-old public servant for trying to keep Americans alive. As for Fauci's private diary entries, relishing his new fame and read gleefully by GOP Senators who preen for attention 24/7, if celebrating the limelight were a capital offense, Donald Trump would have spent the last 40 years on death row.

But that's us at present, and not only on the Right. On the Left, shouting down people with whom you disagree, calling them supporters of "genocide" if they believe that Hamas and Hezbollah are the actual cause of the suffering post Oct. 7 and threatening them with reputational annihilation is now normalized. Public squares have been turned into social and political killing fields.

An example of where we are was provided recently by Abdul el-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, who either is or isn't a Democratic Socialist depending on when he's asked and who's asking. He's made no secret of his revulsion for anyone who declines to use "genocide" -- the "G-word" -- to characterize Israel's response to Hamas' invasion on Oct. 7. He's been plain about his intention to use his victory in Michigan to threaten Democratic candidates who don't fall in line to make certain they do.

Recently he analogized his plan to the medieval practice of cutting enemies' heads off and displaying the severed heads on wooden spikes to serve as warnings to others. "If I win ... if y'all came at me, so now I get to come at you, and, you know, primarying people like John Fetterman, I have no problem to do that," he told supporters. "Ideally, you put one ogre on a pike and then everyone gets the message and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different."

It's Intimidation 101, and it has become who we are and what we do.

However, on a positive note, when asked whether this was the kind of discourse that we need at this fraught time, el-Sayad was all reassurance.

He was "speaking metaphorically," a spokesman clarified.

Good to know.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.