Former President Barack Obama privately called Donald Trump an “idiot” and a “liar” in a diary entry recorded by Dr. Tony Fauci, giving a fresh, written glimpse into how one of the bitterest fights of the COVID era was playing out behind closed doors. The entry, tied to Fauci’s pandemic-era journal, was released by Rand Paul.
The disclosure is pulling new attention because the diary was not a stray note. It was a record Fauci kept while he was under relentless attack as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and later as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. In 2021, Obama contacted Fauci to offer support as MAGA targeted him over his COVID leadership, and Fauci wrote that Obama described Donald Trump Jr. as “a f---ing moron” and Trump as “a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar.”
That makes the diary more than a partisan souvenir. It shows that while public criticism of Fauci was accelerating, private backing from Obama was also being documented in real time. Fauci’s notes landed amid a broader campaign that tied him to vaccine advocacy, mask mandates and lockdowns, all while false claims spread that he had been involved in cruel puppy experiments. Donald Trump Jr. sold T-shirts and sweatshirts with the slogan “Fauci Kills Puppies,” and the journal later issued a correction in October 2021 to the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases paper about beagle experiments in Tunisia.
There is also a dispute over what the release itself represents. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leaked the diary, according to the article, and has argued the papers are not private reflections at all but “government records created on a government computer by a federal employee during one of the most consequential public health emergencies in history.” He said the files covered “about eight months” and were stored across “11 separate servers,” an argument meant to cast the journal as public record rather than a sealed personal archive.
For Fauci, the stakes were immediate and personal. In 2021, after false claims about puppy experiments spread, he was bombarded with angry phone calls and threats; his assistant stopped answering the phone for two weeks after receiving 3,600 calls in 36 hours. The diary release does not settle the fight over Fauci’s pandemic legacy, but it does make one thing plain: the private record now being fought over was created during the same period when the public attacks on him were at their loudest.
What comes next is not another diary page but a political fight over whose version of those months counts as the record. Rand Paul is using the release to press his case against Fauci, while the pages themselves give critics and defenders a new line to argue over: whether they are a candid window into power or selected evidence in a broader campaign.
