Anthony Fauci kept a diary during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it turns out he was not a fan of his boss. The journal, released by Rand Paul in what was apparently supposed to embarrass Fauci, instead produced a remarkably detailed record of one of the most decorated scientists in American history watching the President of the United States lose his mind in real time.
The Hits Keep Coming
According to The Guardian, Fauci's private journal entries describe Trump as 'rambling,' 'crazy,' 'desperate,' 'bumbling,' 'incompetent,' 'an idiot,' 'a true embarrassment,' 'totally nuts,' and, finally, 'truly an obnoxious adolescent.' That is not a partial list. That is the list. One man. One journal. Eight separate insults spread across roughly a year.
The entries also include a March 2021 note in which Fauci writes that Trump's attempts to hold onto power after losing the 2020 election remind him 'historically of Hitler.' So if you thought the obnoxious adolescent line was the marquee item here, there is actually more.
Rand Paul released these diaries on purpose. To damage Fauci. Read that sentence again and let it sit.
The Part Where Fauci Tried to Save Trump From Himself
The Guardian reports that as early as February 27, 2020, Fauci was on a late-night call with Trump trying to talk him out of downplaying the virus. Fauci even framed it in purely political terms, writing that he told Trump his re-election chances would suffer more from covering up a bad situation than from being honest about it.
Trump's response, per Fauci's diary: he listened, seemed to understand, and then went right back out the next day and downplayed it anyway. A man was handed a roadmap to avoid his own political destruction and threw it in the trash before breakfast.
By May 2020, Fauci was writing that Trump was 'getting out of control in pushing to open up the country and get the economy back before election day. He is desparate. This is all about re-election.' The spelling error is Fauci's. The observation proved correct regardless.
Two Press Conferences a Day Because Why Do Actual Work
The Guardian also pulls out a March 14, 2020 entry, right in the thick of the first wave of shutdowns, where Fauci was already exhausted by Trump's obsession with ratings and press coverage. Trump wanted two press conferences a day. One in the morning, one in the evening. Fauci wrote that this left no time to actually do the job of managing a once-in-a-generation public health crisis.
This lines up with everything the rest of the world watched happen in real time. The rambling White House briefings. The bleach. The light inside the body. The hydroxychloroquine. While public health officials were trying to track a virus tearing through a country of 330 million people, the President needed his face on television twice a day.
Rand Paul's Plan to Destroy Fauci Goes Slightly Sideways
Here is where this story gets funny in the way that things are only funny once you've accepted that American politics is a full-contact absurdist theater production. Rand Paul released these diaries to hurt Fauci's reputation. The rightwing press, The Guardian notes, has focused its coverage almost entirely on the parts where Fauci seems excited about meeting Joan Baez and Julia Roberts and Sean Penn during his COVID fame era.
That's the attack. The celebrity stuff. The man who spent a year being called a fraud and a criminal by the MAGA faithful, who received death threats against himself and his family, who had to watch the federal government publicly try to discredit him while he was managing a pandemic, liked that Julia Roberts knew his name. That's the scandal.
Meanwhile the actual content of the diaries, the part where Fauci told Trump the truth about the virus in late February 2020 and Trump ignored it days before American deaths started climbing, is apparently not the focus. Funny how that works.
The Hearing That Paul Has Been Waiting For
The diary release is timed to a congressional hearing at which Fauci, now 85, was compelled to appear, according to The Guardian. Paul has promised to 'make sure Fauci answers for his dangerous decisions and the consequences they had for millions.' The two men have a documented history, including a 2022 hearing where Fauci told Paul directly that his attacks were 'kindling the crazies out there' and that threats on Fauci's life and harassment of his children followed Paul's public crusade against him.
Fauci also charged Paul at that hearing with 'making a catastrophic epidemic for your political gain.' Six years later, here they are again. One man compelled to appear before a senator whose primary contribution to the COVID era was undermining the public health response while it was happening and then blaming the guy who tried to run it.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what these diaries actually are. They are the private record of a scientist watching a president choose performance over reality during a public health emergency that killed over a million Americans. Fauci called Trump an idiot in his diary. Trump called Fauci a fraud on television. One of those men was trying to stop people from dying. The other one was scheduling two press conferences a day and going to campaign rallies while cases surged. The diary entries do not require much interpretation.
The detail that deserves the most attention, buried under the celebrity name-dropping and the colorful insults, is the February 2020 phone call. Fauci told Trump the truth. He told him that honesty about the virus's severity was his best political move, forget the public health argument for a second, just on pure electoral math. Trump heard him, seemed to get it, and the next morning went right back to the script. That is not a failure of communication. That is a choice. Everything that followed was downstream of that choice.
Rand Paul spent years positioning himself as the man who would finally expose Anthony Fauci. He subpoenaed the diaries, timed the release to a hearing, got the rightwing media machine spinning. And what he produced is a document showing that the nation's top infectious disease expert privately thought the President was an incompetent embarrassment while publicly trying to hold the pandemic response together. If Paul considers that a kill shot, he should maybe reconsider his definition of winning.
