Anthony Fauci, former top infectious-disease official at the National Institutes of Health, wrote in his publicly released diary of President Donald Trump, “POTUS has no interest at all in the Pandemic. He is focusing on blocking Biden from being POTUS. He is embarrassing the USA.”
In late July 2026, the unredacted diary of Anthony Fauci — the chief medical adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden during the COVID-19 pandemic — was the subject of a Senate committee hearing. During the hearing, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned Fauci about his role during the pandemic.
Posts across multiple social media sites claimed Fauci wrote a scathing entry in his diary about Trump and his base. (Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News his team extracted the diary from government servers.)
The alleged quote read:
POTUS [President of the United States] has no interest at all in the Pandemic. He is focusing on blocking Biden from being POTUS. He is embarrassing the USA. However, 72,000,000 voted for him. Difficult to understand. Craziness has overtaken part of our country.
The quote spread (archived) on X, Instagram and Facebook, and Snopes readers searched the site for information.
The politics-focused Instagram account for The Washington Post originally posted the image of the quote that other users shared. The words were correctly attributed to Fauci — they were a direct quote pulled from the document (archived) containing his diary entries (PDF Page 476, highlight ours):
Fauci confirmed the authenticity of the diary in his opening statement for the Senate hearing on July 28, saying (at 0:59, emphasis ours):
Given Sen. Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, “Behind bars.”
Fauci wrote the entry on Nov. 16, 2020, just days after Biden won the presidential election. Trump received 47% of the popular vote, or 74,223,975 votes.
The diary illustrates how Trump and Fauci’s relationship evolved over the course of Trump’s presidency. While early entries indicated mutual respect (in January 2020, Fauci wrote that he was “surprised and very pleased” by a conversation he had with Trump), later in the year Fauci’s entries about the president were much more critical.
“Trump is on the campaign trail spewing nonsense. He is really out of control,” Fauci wrote in October 2020. “A true embarrassment.”
In sum, the quote in which Fauci said Trump had “no interest at all” in the COVID-19 pandemic and was “embarrassing” the U.S. was correctly attributed. It was an extract from his publicly released diary, which Fauci himself stated was authentic.
For further reading, we verified another diary entry in which Fauci wrote that his doctors discovered he had a “pulmonary infarct” (dead lung tissue) six months after he got his first COVID-19 vaccine — though we confirmed the CDC does not list pulmonary infarction as a common side effect of any approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccine used in the U.S.
Sources
A, et al. ‘Rand Paul Releases Anthony Fauci’s Pandemic-Era Diary Notes. Here’s What They Tell Us’. NPR, 27 July 2026. Science. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/27/nx-s1-5909531/rand-paul-anthony-fauci-coronavirus-diary-lab-leak-origin.
Cancryn, Sarah Owermohle, Adam. ‘Diary Entries, a Subpoena and an Anticipated Clash: Dr. Anthony Fauci and Rand Paul’s Long-Running Battle Returns to the Hill | CNN Politics’. CNN, 28 July 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/28/politics/anthony-fauci-diary-rand-paul.
Christensen, Laerke. ‘Did Fauci Suffer Pulmonary Infarction Due to COVID-19 Vaccine? What We Know’. Snopes, 28 July 2026, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/fauci-pulmonary-infarction-covid/.
Federal Election Commission. ‘Federal Elections 2020: Election Results for the U.S. President, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives’. www.fec.gov, Oct. 2022, https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2020.pdf.
Ibrahim, Nur. ’25 Claims Involving Fauci We’ve Investigated’. Snopes, 30 July 2026, https://www.snopes.com//collections/anthony-fauci-rumors-collection/.
Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DbWkL_IjPka/?img_index=4. Accessed 30 July 2026.
‘Takeaways from Anthony Fauci’s COVID-Era Diaries’. AP News, 29 July 2026, https://apnews.com/article/fauci-diaries-covid-origins-rand-paul-6b25da9f75a0becbaf2886ab22643e67.
U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY & GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS. ‘Anthony Fauci’s Diary’. www.paul.senate.gov, https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026.07.24_Tonys-Diary-Package.pdf.
– YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM8Il0kxIo8. Accessed 30 July 2026.