Anthony Fauci's personal journal entries, released by a Republican senator seeking to undermine the former health official, instead reveal months of scathing assessments of Donald Trump during the first year of the Covid-19 crisis.
Fauci branded the president as "rambling," "crazy," "desperate," "bumbling," "incompetent," "an idiot," "a true embarrassment," "totally nuts," and "truly an obnoxious adolescent" in handwritten notes spanning early 2020 through 2021.
The entries document Fauci's growing frustration with what he saw as Trump's obsession with media attention and election prospects at the expense of pandemic response. On February 27, 2020, just as public alarm was building, Fauci recorded a late-night call with Trump. He wrote that he spent 20 to 25 minutes urging the president not to minimize the threat, even framing the argument in political terms: that downplaying the virus could damage Trump's re-election chances more than honest acknowledgment of potential disaster.
"I thought that he heard what I said, but the next day, he again underplayed it," Fauci noted.
By mid-March, with lockdowns intensifying, Fauci's frustration deepened. Trump wanted two daily press conferences, morning and evening, which Fauci complained consumed all available time for actual work. The president's focus remained fixed on "the fluff of ratings and publicity."
In May, Fauci wrote that Trump was "getting out of control" pushing to reopen the economy before election day, driven purely by desperation for political recovery. That assessment only hardened as the year progressed. By October, with cases rising and Trump campaigning aggressively, Fauci called him "really out of control" and "a true embarrassment."
The most severe entry came in March 2021, after the failed Capitol riot. Fauci wrote that Trump's attempt to overturn his electoral defeat reminded him "historically of Hitler," before concluding: "He is truly an obnoxious adolescent."
Fauci also documented his communication with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in May 2020. He noted in his diary that he had spoken with Woodward on background about the early pandemic response, providing historical context from January and February. That conversation would later inform Woodward's reporting on the administration's handling of Covid.
The diary release was orchestrated by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a longtime critic of Fauci's pandemic response. Paul has repeatedly accused Fauci of unnecessarily shutting down the country and covering up evidence that the virus had human-made origins in U.S.-funded research. Fauci has consistently maintained that the virus jumped from animals to humans, the prevailing scientific consensus.
The two men have clashed publicly before. At a January 2022 hearing, Fauci told Paul his attacks had incited threats against him and his family, including obscene phone calls. Fauci accused Paul of exploiting the pandemic "for your political gain."
Fauci, now 85, was compelled to appear at a hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Paul has vowed to "make sure Fauci answers for his dangerous decisions and the consequences they had for millions."
Right-wing outlets focusing on the diary release have highlighted Fauci's notes about his rise to celebrity status during the pandemic, including meetings with figures like Joan Baez, Julia Roberts, and Sean Penn. Fauci did seem to take satisfaction in his prominence. In July 2020, as tensions with Trump escalated, he wrote about receiving "major, major show of support" from multiple sectors, with most people expressing outrage at what they viewed as the Trump administration's "bumbling and incompetent" effort to discredit "the most credible scientist in the world."
Author James Rodriguez: "Fauci's own words expose the personal toll of trying to manage both a president and a pandemic, but they also reveal a man documenting his concerns in real time rather than rewriting history."
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