Fauci Complained About “Obnoxious Adolescent” Trump in Covid Diary

Dr. Anthony Fauci started off with a good relationship with President Trump but eventually came to believe he was an “obnoxious adolescent,” according to excerpts of his diary released by Republican Senator Rand Paul, the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The released diary entries start from December 2019, right before the Covid-19 outbreak, and continue to December 2022, when Fauci left his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Paul released over 1,000 pages from the diary as part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which Paul claims came from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The diary doesn’t have any kind of smoking gun on Covid’s origins, but it does show an inside view of different moments of the pandemic, as well as how Trump mishandled it. Fauci wrote glowingly about how he met Trump on January 29, 2020, in the White House Situation Room, and the president told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy. My good friend Lou Dobbs told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.”

“He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me. I was surprised and very pleased and the deputies were clearly stunned and impressed,” Fauci wrote. He added that Trump thanked him after the meeting, telling him, “We are counting on you.”

Fauci’s entries show how Trump’s actions over the course of the pandemic quickly changed his mind. After a March 2020 press conference, Fauci complained about how Trump “wasted the opportunity to just focus on the relief package and went into his diatribe against previous administrations.”

Later, in August, Fauci wrote that he had a hard time explaining to Trump that increased testing did not increase Covid cases.

“All in all it was a manifestation that he is desperate and still does not understand the pandemic. Very interesting encounter,” Fauci wrote.

In November, Trump was angry at Fauci for a Washington Post report where Fauci said that Joe Biden’s campaign was “taking [the pandemic] seriously from a public health perspective,” while Trump was more concerned about the economy and reopening the country. Trump called Fauci and let loose.

“Tony, I really like you, and you know that, but what the f—k are you doing? You constantly drop bombs on me. Everybody wants me to fire you, but I am not going to fire you, you have too illustrious of a career, but you have to be positive,” Trump said on the call, according to Fauci.

“I like you but so many people, not only in the White House, but throughout the country hate you because of what you are doing.… And that f—ker Biden. He is so f—king stupid. You are 10 times smarter than he is. I am going to kick his f—king ass in this election. I will win by a landslide. Just wait and see.… Tony, you have to be positive. I do not want to keep you off TV, but when you are out there, you have to be positive.”

By March 2021, as vaccines became publicly available, Fauci called Trump an “obnoxious adolescent.”

Looking at these diary entries, it’s obvious that Fauci was simply trying to do his job in the face of an obstinate president, and wasn’t the devious or negligent mastermind that conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party make him out to be. They should be more concerned that Trump is back in power and can’t be trusted if a new pandemic arises.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino is reportedly plotting to transform the World Cup into a moneymaking scheme—so, is it any surprise he turned to these experts in corruption?

FIFA announced Tuesday that it would create the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, a new business entity, to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics have decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

To make matters worse, Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration, The Times reported Tuesday. The move comes amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, after the president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

FIFA said that it planned to expand football development funding to more than $10 billion, “subject to approval by FIFA Member Associations.”

The UEFA Europa League immediately released a statement outright rejecting the proposal.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” the statement said. “UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game. The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade—especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.

“None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell,” the statement said.

A Guatemalan couple’s attempt to reunite following an ICE deportation ended with the two being shot to death in a sugarcane field in the country.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, were found gagged with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of physical trauma, St. Louis Public Radio reports. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying next to her mother, with signs of dehydration. She’s now recovering in a medical center.

“I felt that they took the thing I wanted most,” Rolando Pérez Paz, Pérez Paz’s brother, told STLPR. “I felt a huge pain because it was my brother, my sister-in-law—people that wanted to work, to fight.”

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Ronaldo were driving to their roofing jobs in April 2025 near their home in Overland, Missouri, when they were stopped by ICE agents, who emerged from an unmarked car and pulled them out of their white work van. The agents told them that there wasn’t a warrant for their arrests but that they were being detained for lacking legal status.

González de la Cruz initially stayed in Overland, giving birth to their daughter last year and working two manual labor jobs to support the couple’s three children. But financial pressures mounted, and she was afraid she would be detained and separated from her children despite an active asylum case, organizers with St. Louis immigrant rights group Fuerza, which she was working with, told STLPR. So she decided to self-deport to Guatemala with her children to join her husband.

The couple was reported missing in Guatemala on July 20 after attempting to register a motorcycle in a nearby town, Rolando Pérez Paz told the radio outlet. In the last few months, the family struggled with money and had trouble with violence and the federal government—issues that had led them to seek asylum in the U.S. in the first place.

An ICE spokesperson told the radio outlet that Nixon Pérez Paz had two convictions for drunk driving, but STLPR did not find any court records to confirm that account. The spokesperson also said that Nixon Pérez Paz had an open container charge in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2010, but prosecutors had dropped that.

“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn’t be going through this sorrow,” Ronaldo told the radio outlet. He’s now caring for his three young nieces but doesn’t know how to explain their parents’ deaths to them.

“Unfortunately, immigration—the [U.S.] government—doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

Even Fox News is confused as to who exactly President Trump has been negotiating with in Iran. 

President Trump claimed this week that he’s talking to Iran “right now,” but Iran’s foreign ministry has fervently denied that claim, saying it’s not interested in direct negotiations. When asked about the contradiction on Fox News Tuesday, Trump struggled to explain.

“We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said. “But Iran has come out publicly and said, ‘We’re not talking to the U.S.”

“Well, they just came out and said ‘We are talking’ a little while ago,” Trump interrupted. 

“So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?” 

“For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say, ‘We’re not talking’ or ‘We didn’t discuss nuclear.’ Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that,” Trump said, avoiding answering the direct question. “We’ve had some very good talks.” 

He then went on to change the subject entirely, instead discussing recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham’s insistence upon an Iran deal—surprising, if true, given the late senator’s violent, hawkish approach to foreign policy. 

“He was very much a hawk … [even] he was somebody that said it was a good time to make a deal.… Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”  

It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war. This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again. 

Despite the White House’s myriad attempts to rein in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiratorial rhetoric, Donald Trump himself is still expecting anti-vax results.

The president is reportedly losing faith in his health secretary’s ability to slash childhood vaccines. The issue came to a head during a May lunch at Trump’s National Golf Club in northern Virginia, when Trump pressed Kennedy as to why he wasn’t doing more to probe the (widely debunked) tie between vaccines and autism. At the time, Trump told Kennedy point blank that he believed the secretary “had the yips,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday night, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

The topic reared its head again at a mid-June meeting between the two men in the Oval Office, during which Trump lamented that Kennedy simply wasn’t doing enough.

Trump reportedly believes he has given Kennedy ample time to prove himself, and is disappointed that Kennedy hasn’t made more progress.

Practically every conversation between Trump and his health secretary circles back to the vaccine conspiracy, reported the Journal. The president has shared with his aides that he believes Kennedy will be a failure if he fails to produce results.

In fact, lobbyists and Department of Health and Human Services staffers suspect that Trump will replace Kennedy with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz, likely after the midterms, the Journal reported.

Trump regularly turns to Oz for health policy advice, even on issues that have nothing to do with Oz’s agency. Oz, in turn, makes sure Trump gets his way every time.

The president’s priorities on the matter have since been made clear: HHS must do more to peel back the federal guidelines for the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of shots given to children.

Sources who spoke with the Journal suggested that the president is all in on the anti-vax conspiracy, sharing that Trump expects to see autism rates drop as a result of the decreased inoculations.

Limiting vaccine access was a core tenet of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—until White House advisers pressured him to lie low, fearing that his rabble-rousing, anti-science ideology could further harm Republican odds come November.

Already at issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, Trump started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living. He has also slashed taxes for the wealthy and stalled the mechanics of Congress by strong-arming his allies into supporting his wildly unpopular voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running HHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

Kennedy has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.