Dr. Fauci used the force of his intellect, his integrity, his honesty and his devotion to the truth just like someone else we know, love and trust.
Jul 30, 2026
(Artwork created by Bob Englehardt for Cagle Cartoons, 2020)
Six years ago this month, I published a piece about Dr. Tony Fauci assuring him that many of us had his back. And, it wasn’t just because we are both passionate Italians from Brooklyn who believe public service is a sacred calling.
Nope, many of us who worked in the HIV/AIDS field and have admired his life-saving work for decades, would do everything in our power to protect him, amidst the craziness and back-biting of the failing first Trump Administration in the summer of 2020, during the COVID Pandemic. He was the only truth-teller in a land of liars, conspiracy freaks, frauds and flim-flam artists, and our very lives depended upon his integrity, courage and devotion to science. He was our Yoda.
Already coming under attack from anti-vaxxers, anti-science nut jobs, and QAnon crazies surrounding Trump, I urged Dr. Fauci to speak the unfettered truth about how Donald Trump was incompetently & ignorantly mishandling the federal response to the COVID 19 pandemic, resulting in, ultimately, over one-million infections and deaths in the United States. Trump’s abject stupidity (“Just ingest bleach”), and his malignant incompetence (“one day, like a miracle, it will go away”) were killing us and many people we loved, including the 92-year old matriarch of our own family.
At almost the precise time I was suggesting that he blow-the-whistle on the Trump Administration’s anti-science idiocy and preventable harm being done to tens of thousands of people, Dr. Fauci was struggling to stem the catastrophe of Covid-19 from within that negligent Administration, since he still had Trump’s support and respect, and he was polling as the most trusted public official in the nation. Yet, like Generals James Mattis and Mark Milley who held their noses and battled to save the country from within, Fauci used the force of his intelligence and commitment to public service to survive, but he could not hide his growing misgivings to himself over what was happening before his own eyes. To preserve his sanity and sort things out, he kept a “private” diary for three years.
On August 4, 2020, as we learned from Dr. Fauci’s private diaries just released this week, Fauci complained that:
“Trump is desperate and doesn’t understand the pandemic.”
Four days later, Dr. Fauci’s private observations became even more dire: ‘
“POTUS acting even more erratically.”
We tried to warn Fauci, at the peak of his popularity, to step out and bring the Science-denying sociopaths in the Trump Administration tumbling down, but his great sense of duty, idealism and ego got in his way. Plus, at that time, was willing to believe the endless depth of the dunderheadedness and depravity of Donald Trump and the people propping him up. Things began to take an even more dangerous turn, as the pandemic raged on, and Fauci wrote about it:
Fauci diary, August 31, 2020: “Trump stoking violence and racial tension in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon (in the aftermath of George Floyd demonstrations.)…embracing false claims by RightWing QAnon groups about deaths relative to COVID-19. QAnon is saying that all the other deaths had nothing to do with COVID-19. The POTUS loves this and is tweeting that Fauci & Birx (Deborah) shut down the country for only 9,000 deaths. What an idiot! “
The actual cumulative COVID-19 death toll in the United States at that time in 2020 was 206,005 reported deaths, with overall confirmed cases approaching 7.2 million cases, making QAnon crackpot conspiracists—whom Trump was trusting for information—approximately 200,000 deaths off the actual total.
As the 2020 Election approached —an election which Joe Biden won by over 9 million popular votes, and 306 to 232 Electoral votes—things got worse. Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary entry of October 15, 2020:
“ As the election nears, the cases increase and surges are more inevitable as we enter cooler weather. Trump is on the campaign trail spewing nonsense. He is really out of control. A true embarrassment.”
Two days before the 2020 Election, which Trump would lose, Trump was bonkers. Fauci wrote that Trump told him:
“You constantly drop bombs on me (by telling the truth); everybody wants me to fire you—you have to be more helpful.
Death threats against Dr. Fauci, his wife and his three daughters, had ratcheted up as the election approached, and for the balance of the year bodyguard protection became a necessity. The vitriol and viciousness aimed at Fauci and his family grew more virulent after Trump lost the election, as Trump was spinning out even more into an “alternate universe,” as Fauci wrote.
Only 10 days after the election on November 13, 2020, Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary:
“ Continued surge: 138,000 new infections yesterday. POTUS has no interest at all in the pandemic. He’s focused on blocking Biden from being POTUS; he is embarrassing the USA….craziness has overtaken the country.”
Even after Biden became President, and Dr. Fauci became his top Medical Advisor, Fauci was increasingly appalled by Trump’s behavior. He wrote in his diary on March 29, 2021, two months into the Biden Administration:
“Trump is truly an obnoxious adolescent.”
Dr. Fauci could have just as well been describing the spoiled child of Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, an eye doctor who cannot see straight because of his insane jealously of Dr. Fauci’s distinguished medical and scientific career, or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s HHS Secretary with no medical background, who lead the anti-vaccine movement in the United States for more than two decades, spreading destructive & widely disproven lies about autism and childhood vaccines.
Fauci’s immense public popularity continued into Biden’s presidency, as the Pandemic proceeded to spread and the first COVID vaccines were administered on a broad scale at the very beginning of Biden’s term, despite opposition by Trump supporters around the country, and anti-vaxxers. RJK Jr., in November, 2021, published a scurrilous book about Dr. Fauci (“The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy & Public Health”). The Science Based Medicine website called Kennedy’s lie-infected screed “a conspiracy theory extravaganza.”
Still, the garbage-dump of a book amplified the drumbeat of hysterical attacks against Anthony Fauci, as his power over the nation’s public health priorities grew during the first two years of the Biden Administration. Fauci left the Biden Administration at the end of 2022.
But the hatred of Fauci and his positive influence on the nation’s public health, by RFK, Jr., and the juvenile mean-girl Senator Rand Paul, festered for years. When Trump was elected President in 2024, RFK, Jr., was appointed head of HHS, and stacked the agency that has enormous influence over public health with the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists who set out to dismantle much of the work Dr. Fauci accomplished over five decades of public service. Senator Paul became Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Kennedy, who famously claimed to have snorted cocaine off of dirty toilet seats to prove he wasn’t afraid of germs or parasites, assigned some of his most rabid anti-Fauci staff members to comb through three years of contemporaneous notes which Fauci made on government computers over three years, from 2019-2022, during the height of the COVID Pandemic.
Dubbed, “The Fauci Diaries,” it’s took Kennedy’s malevolent minions some eight full months to assemble Fauci’s writings—a staffing decision made at precisely the same time HHS made deep staff cuts and failed to control cases of Measles and Cyclospora induced diarrhea exploding across the United States. Once completed, RFK, Jr., in another act of personal revenge against Fauci, handed over more than 1,000 pages of “The Fauci Diaries,” to GOP Senator Rand Paul, who was chairing a Senate Homeland Security Hearing looking into the origins of COVID.
The Kentucky Republican’s kangaroo-court of a hearing enabled Paul, an insecure, arch enemy of Dr. Fauci going back years, to verbally abuse Fauci and demand that Fauci’s attorney be tossed out of the Senate hearing room. It also provided a platform to Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, to shout at Fauci, “Who the Fuck do you think you are? Do you feel like you are in deep shit?” Those questions were odd, coming from Moreno who has not raised any questions to his own son-in-law, about the domestic violence charges filed by Moreno’s own daughter against his son-in-law—GOP Ohio Congressman Max Miller—for violence against her and against Moreno’s young granddaughter. Moreno’s Ohio voters may have been wondering how hard he’d fight for them, if he wouldn’t fight for his own daughter and young granddaughter. The Fauci show-hearing gave Moreno the chance to act tough.
Senator Paul’s sham Hearing also shined a spotlight on the Lex Luther-like bulging head of one of the biggest hypocrites in US Senate history, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. Scott, whose former health care company—which he oversaw— was found guilty of committing a $1.7 billion in Medicare fraud—self-righteously & shamelessly grilled the leading public health advocate in the nation’s history about Fauci’s record of combatting the most deadly pandemic in U.S. history. Scott, shameless as always, did this with a fraudulent sense of high dudgeon, despite his company being found guilty of committing 14 felonies of defrauding the US government. To avoid prison time by taking responsibility for the egregious crimes, Rick Scott, instead, took the Fifth Amendment 75 times, AND pocketed $350 million from American taxpayers whom he stuck with the bill for his fraud upon the US Treasury.
Ironically, Trump Administration officials and Republican Senators and their right-wing media maggots have been whining about the fact that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights some 100 times, despite Rick Scott’s record of cheating US Taxpayers by taking the Fifth Amendent 75 times, and Donald Trump—who once famously said “only the Mob takes the Fifth”—invoking his 5th Amendment rights over 400 times in a civil deposition in NY involving his companies defrauding New York State out of over $450 million. Two years ealier in the same case, Trump’s son Eric, a key officer in the Trump Organization, took the Fifth more than 500 times.
Now, at 85 years old, it’s more important than ever for Tony Fauci to know that those of us who have witnessed, first hand, the great advances he guided in medical science and infectious disease research, treatment and care—particularly in the area of HIV/AIDS— during his 54 years of stellar public service, will never be forget his achievements, nor allow them to be minimized.
No one else, before or after Dr. Fauci, has had the enormous capacity, credibility, knowledge, record of accomplishment, depth of expertise, passion for public health, and track record in getting a huge bureaucracy to move into action as Anthony Fauci exercised on behalf of all Americans in battling a cascade of serious public health challenges.
No puerile histrionics by Rand Paul; no feigned outrage by Bernie Moreno—who won’t even protect his own daughter and granddaughter from domestic abuse; and no transparently hypocritical hyperbole by Florida’s utterly corrupt Medicare Fraud King Rick Scott, can undo the historic accomplishments in public health, and public service, of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
With Fauci, the Force is strong.