Add Donald Trump to the long list of pandemic-era politicians trying to rewrite history to omit their Covid policy mistakes. This week, the former president sat for an interview with popular YouTuber Tim Pool in which he attempted to downplay the extent of his cooperation with Dr Anthony Fauci during the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak.

“Fauci wasn’t a big player in my administration like he was after I left,” Trump said. “And Biden made him the king of everything… Fauci was not the big player with me and, in fact, I did things that he didn’t want to do.”

It may be true that Trump didn’t always follow Fauci’s advice. But the notion that Fauci wasn’t a “big player” in the administration’s handling of the pandemic is a bold-faced lie. In his prominent role as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director, Fauci was front-and-centre at press conference after press conference with Trump.

The then-President referred to Fauci as one of the “best” and “most talented people on Earth”. Even after the doctor’s initial popularity faded and Trump faced calls from within the Republican Party to fire him, he rebuffed this, saying “he’s a wonderful guy.” At the very end of Trump’s presidency, he even awarded Fauci a presidential commendation in recognition of his “exceptional efforts” on Covid-19.

Dr Fauci was also intimately involved in directly shaping the Trump administration’s pandemic policies. For example, on 3 April, 2020, the president formally recommended that Americans wear cloth masks — something we now know was nearly useless — and Fauci was intimately involved with shaping and promoting this policy. What’s more, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force Fauci played an influential role in shaping Trump’s official guidelines for states to use when reopening from lockdown. The former president also appointed Fauci to a key position in his “Operation Warp Speed”, the (widely praised) programme under which the Covid-19 vaccine was developed.

Trump isn’t the only one who has tried to quietly amend his Covid record. President Joe Biden, for example, has repeatedly downplayed the extent to which the Trump administration had already fleshed out the Covid-19 vaccination programme before he took control. “Just over four weeks ago, America had no real plan to vaccinate most of the country,” Biden said shortly after taking office, alleging that Trump had “failed to order enough vaccines, failed to mobilise the effort to administer the shots, failed to set up vaccine centres. That changed the moment we took office.”

As FactCheck.org points out, this is false on two counts: Trump had ordered enough vaccines and did have a plan to administer the vaccine. But Biden wanted more credit for the rollout, so he decided to tweak the history in his favour.

In yet another example of this kind of Covid duplicity, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo recently made waves after claiming that the intense pandemic-era restrictions placed on New Yorkers were “voluntary”. “Government had no capacity to enforce any of this,” Cuomo claimed. “If they said ‘I’m not wearing a mask’ there was nothing I could do about it.”

“It was really all voluntary,” he concluded. “It was extraordinary when you think about it. That society acted with that uniformity voluntarily.” Tell that to the people who were fined and/or arrested for failing to comply with mask mandates or business closures.

It’s understandable that elected officials whose decisions during the pandemic aged poorly want to evade scrutiny for their mistakes. But democracy only functions when we hold our leaders to account. We shouldn’t stand for it when politicians, regardless of party, try to escape accountability by rewriting history and gaslighting the public.