Why Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s Gomer Pyle, Wants to Sue Fauci

The Republican might want to worry about getting sued himself.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

Since Tommy Tuberville stepped onto the national political stage, he has proven, over and over again, that he is a fundamentally unremarkable man.

Before he was elected to a job where he could actively make our lives worse, he was a journeyman football coach, mostly for SEC teams, most notably Auburn. He won a few coaching awards along the way, and I’ve always thought his career was a little overrated, but hell, how much damage can a football coach really do? Call the wrong play on third-and-seven? Lose to Georgia? Ruin a few Saturdays? As long as he wasn’t coaching my Trojans, I figured, let the man wander the sidelines in peace.

To be fair, and Tuberville doesn’t especially deserve fairness, some of his former players have praised him as an effective coach and a good leader. But others have called that image what it is: bullshit with a headset on. When Tuberville began weighing in on race, immigration, and reparations, former players like Karlos Dansby, T.J. Jackson, and Troy Reddick voiced real disappointment and anger, describing his comments as divisive, offensive, and disconnected from the multicultural communities he once recruited from.

Apparently, Tuberville was perfectly comfortable depending on Black athletes to win football games; listening to them once they stopped wearing his uniform was a bridge too far. Dansby called out Tuberville’s 2022 remark that Democrats support reparations because “they think the people that do the crime are owed that” as “unnecessary, dead wrong, ugly.” Jackson, an all-SEC noseguard on Auburn’s 2004 undefeated team who went on to earn a doctorate in education, put it even more plainly: “I’m a guy that played for him: He wouldn’t get my vote.” These aren’t strangers. These are men Tuberville coached, recruited, and stood next to on a sideline for years, which makes their verdict a little harder to dismiss than whatever nonsense he cooked up for a campaign ad.

And it isn’t just old players from a football career two decades gone. It’s happening right now, to the people he’s currently asking to elect him governor. As data centers have sprouted up across Alabama, drawing legitimate complaints from residents about noise, water use, and rising energy costs, Tuberville has responded not by listening but by dismissing the opposition as Chinese disinformation, telling a room of Alabama sheriffs that concerned residents are “listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that’s coming from China, because China does not want us to grow.” He’s called their concerns “bull crap,” and, in the same breath, told the very people whose votes he’s asking for that “we cannot let the animals run the zoo.” This is not a man who has ever much cared what the people underneath him think, whether they’re wearing shoulder pads or standing at a town hall meeting.

To understand how a man this unremarkable rose to the U.S. Senate, you have to understand the backdrop he was running against, and how Alabama got there. Before Tuberville, Alabama Democrats had one recent taste of statewide victory: Doug Jones, a decent, honorable man, whatever his faults, running in a 2017 special election against Roy Moore, one of the most revolting candidates American politics has ever produced. Moore stood accused by multiple women of pursuing them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties, the sort of allegation that ordinarily causes a political party to fake a sudden scheduling conflict and stop returning your calls. Republicans, naturally, backed him anyway.