Rand Paul has released diary entries written by Anthony Fauci, and they show the country’s top public health figure growing steadily more disillusioned with Donald Trump as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded. The notes, now public, move from early caution to open contempt by 2021.
The reason people are searching for the Fauci diary now is simple: it puts private words on the record at the center of a public crisis. In late February 2020, Fauci wrote that Trump called late at night to chat about the coronavirus situation in general, and he said he urged him not to underplay the seriousness of it. He warned that minimizing the threat could hurt Trump’s chances for re-election if the outbreak worsened, and he recorded that Trump underplayed the situation again the next day.
By mid-March, the tone had hardened. Fauci wrote that Trump was fixated on the fluff of ratings and publicity and wanted two press conferences a day, a line that captured the growing gap between the public message from the White House and the private frustration inside the response team. By 22 May 2020, Fauci was writing that Trump was getting out of control in pushing to reopen the country and revive the economy before election day. He added that Trump was desperate and that it was all about re-election.
The later entries are sharper still. In October 2020, Fauci wrote that Trump was on the campaign trail spewing nonsense, that he was really out of control and that he was a true embarrassment. By March 2021, he had gone even further, calling Trump truly an obnoxious adolescent. The diary entries do not read like the careful language of a public briefing; they read like a man watching a president handle a once-in-a-century crisis and losing patience with almost every move.
There is another layer to the release that makes it more than a collection of private complaints. In late May 2020, Fauci wrote that he had a long conversation on background with Bob Woodward, who was writing a book on the early response to Covid-19 in the USA, and that he had shared some history from early January and into February. That note shows Fauci was documenting not only his clash with Trump, but also how the early response itself was being recorded for the record.
What Paul chose to release is clear: entries that spotlight Fauci’s judgment of Trump across 2020 and into 2021, especially the comments that show growing anger and exhaustion. What is not clear from the release is why these entries, and not the fuller set of Fauci’s notes, were the ones made public. The selective disclosure matters because it leaves readers with the most political lines and less of the day-to-day record that surrounded them.
The broader fight around Fauci is not new. Paul has long been skeptical of the Covid-19 response led by Fauci, has accused him of needlessly shutting down the country and has pressed claims that Fauci rejects. Fauci has consistently said the virus originated in animal-to-human transmission, and the two men have clashed before. That long-running feud gives the diary release its edge: private notes are now being used as public evidence in a fight that never really ended.
The result is a record that sharpens the picture of 2020 from Fauci’s side. He was not writing as a neutral observer. He was writing as a witness inside the White House orbit, watching a president he had once tried to reason with become, in his own words, increasingly reckless, embarrassing and out of control. The unresolved question is not what Fauci thought. It is how much of the rest of his diary remains unseen.
