COVID vaccine news today centers on a diary kept by Dr. Tony Fauci that recorded Barack Obama privately calling Donald Trump Jr. “a f---ing moron” and Donald Trump “a hopeless idiot” and “a pathologic liar.” The entry surfaced from the pandemic-era period when Fauci was under attack over his COVID leadership and vaccine advice.
Obama also apologized for the crude language in the diary account. Fauci wrote that Obama had contacted him in 2021 to offer support as MAGA attacked him, and that Obama was upset moderate Republicans were not speaking out on his behalf.
Fauci in November 2021
In November 2021, Fauci recorded Obama’s reaction to the criticism he faced. The diary described Obama as saying Trump Jr. was “a f---ing moron” before the former president corrected himself, and that Trump was “a hopeless idiot” and “a pathologic liar.”
The release also lands against a concrete pressure point in Fauci’s own office. In October 2021, he was bombarded with 3,600 angry phone calls in 36 hours after false claims spread that he and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had funded medical experiments on puppies. His assistant then stopped answering the phone for two weeks.
Rand Paul and Kennedy Jr.
Rand Paul released the pandemic-era journal. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. later said the files were “not personal journals” but “government records created on a government computer by a federal employee during one of the most consequential public health emergencies in history.”
He also said in a interview that gathering the files took “about eight months” and required “11 separate servers.” That account leaves one practical question hanging for readers tracking the leak: how the files moved from those servers into Paul’s hands is still the part that explains the dispute over what the diary really is.
Obama and Fauci
The journal entries add a private account of a public fight that already shaped the COVID vaccine debate. Fauci was attacked over vaccines, mask mandates and lockdowns, while Obama’s notes show him defending the doctor even as the pressure kept building around him.
For readers trying to follow the leak, the immediate takeaway is simple: the diary pages now make Obama’s private view of Trump and Trump Jr. part of the public record, and the release itself is now part of the larger argument over who handled the files and what they contained.
