No, Rand Paul isn’t ‘pandemic profiteering’ off his #FireFauci campaign

“Let’s be clear: Rand Paul is fundraising off of his efforts to fire Fauci. He has a button on his website featuring this campaign. But what’s wrong with that?

As Paul said in an interview after their latest showdown, 'I’m proud of the fact people go to RandPaul.com raising money to fire Fauci because he is a menace. Everything he said has been incorrect. And I think he is part of the problem.'

We know Paul raises money over this issue, and he has no problem admitting that he asks for donations to help fire Fauci.

But does this mean this is the actual purpose of Paul’s questions?

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump asked the same question on Thursday in a column titled, ‘How politically helpful have Rand Paul’s attacks on Anthony Fauci been?’

Using spikes in Google traffic each time Fauci and Paul have squared off, Bump determined that Paul had raised his media profile each time and, yes, that has translated into increased donations.

But this didn’t seem to lead Bump to the conclusion that Paul’s Fauci questions were merely or even primarily about political or financial gain.

‘It’s clear that Paul is trying to generate contributions and attention from his fights with Fauci (the website to which Fauci referred is online, for example), but it’s not clear that this is central to Paul’s political efforts.”

‘Nor should one assume Paul’s confrontations are solely offered in bad faith,’ Bump wrote. ‘While Fauci has repeatedly pushed back on his line of questioning, it’s a line of questioning that our fact-checkers consider to be in a gray area.”

Read the entire column.