The call happened on November 4, 2021. Obama reached Fauci on his cellphone, and the two spoke for about 25 minutes in a conversation Fauci described in his notes as incredibly memorable. Obama had called to offer support and, in Fauci’s words, to help in any way that he could while Fauci was taking what Fauci described as an onslaught of slanderous lies from the political right.
Somewhere in that call, Fauci told Obama what Donald Trump Jr. had been doing. Trump Jr. was selling sweatshirts and T shirts on his website, with proceeds going toward his fundraising, printed with the words “Fauci kills puppies.” According to the diary, Obama’s response was immediate. He said Donald Trump Jr. is “a f*cking moron.” He then apologized for using crude language. Then, per Fauci’s account, Obama called Trump a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar.
Fauci added that Obama was very upset that none of the moderate Republicans were speaking out on his behalf, and that they were instead distancing themselves from what Fauci called terrible, slanderous behavior against him.
The puppy line that set the whole thing off deserves a minute, because it was built on a real study twisted into something it was not. In October 2021, a paper published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases described research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency Fauci ran, in which puppies were exposed to sand flies while their heads were held in mesh cages. Sand flies transmit a parasitic disease, and the research was studying it. That detail got flattened online into a claim that Fauci was personally torturing beagles, and it spread fast. Fauci’s assistant received roughly 3,600 phone calls in 36 hours and stopped answering the phone entirely for two weeks. By the time Obama called, Fauci had been living inside that for about a month.
Obama did not just vent. According to the diary, he told Fauci he would call Jeff Zients, who at the time was running the Biden White House’s COVID response, and tell him to mobilize people in the administration to go out publicly and defend Fauci. Whether that ever happened is not something the diary entry answers.
How all of this became public is its own story. Rand Paul chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which gives him subpoena power and control over what his committee releases. He has been Fauci’s most persistent congressional antagonist for years, going back to their televised shouting matches during the pandemic, and he released the diary ahead of Fauci’s testimony before that committee. The intent was clearly to damage Fauci. Conservative outlets have spent the week pulling entries in which Fauci marvels at his own fame, tracks his media appearances, and notes public fascination with him, using them to argue he was more invested in celebrity than in public health. Instead, the entry that traveled furthest was a former president calling the sitting one an idiot.
These are Fauci’s own notes, written by hand, recording his recollection of a phone call. There is no recording and no transcript. Obama’s exact words exist only as Fauci remembered and wrote them the same day. That does not make the account unreliable, and contemporaneous notes are treated as credible evidence in most contexts, but it is a diary and not a tape.
What it does show is a version of Obama that the public rarely sees. His post presidency has been built on public restraint, carefully worded statements, and a general refusal to say the obvious thing out loud about his successor. On a private call with a health official under siege, that restraint was gone. He said what he thought about both Trumps in about fifteen seconds, apologized only for the profanity and not for the assessment, and moved on to offering practical help.
The diary spans 2019 through 2022 and runs past a thousand pages. Reporters and political operatives on both sides are still working through it, and the Obama call is on page 914. More of it is going to come out over the next several weeks, and given who released it and why, the parts that surface next will depend heavily on who is doing the reading.
