The latest release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary pages, dating back to the early days of the first Trump administration, shows the top infectious disease official singing China’s praises but repeatedly disparaging the president he served.
According to the newly published personal notes, Fauci thought highly of China, particularly its infectious disease research, while he felt immense disdain for President Donald Trump.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY), whose office published Fauci’s pre-pandemic writings on Wednesday, quipped that Fauci exhibited signs of “early-onset Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Loathed Trump
The diary records reveal that Fauci’s despisement of Trump developed when Trump was running for president in 2016.
On Sept. 28, 2016, Fauci dedicated diary space that day to mocking Trump’s performance at his debate against Hillary Clinton. In fact, Fauci seemed so engrossed by Trump’s debate performance that he led the day’s log with his thoughts on the first debate between Trump and Clinton, which took place two days prior.
“Trump made a fool of himself,” Fauci headlined the diary entry.
Despite himself having a jam-packed day chock-full of events, Fauci appeared to be quite preoccupied with Trump’s debate performance earlier in the week. Only after criticizing Trump’s debate skills did Fauci move on to journal about his own appearance on a panel put together by the Atlantic, a meeting he had with a Ugandan official, and a book signing party held at the home of prominent Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen.
FAUCI’S DIARY DETAILS HOW HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH TRUMP SOURED
After Trump won the 2016 election, Fauci documented his struggles adjusting to life under the Trump administration.
Even before Trump took office, Fauci was resistant just to meeting with the presidential transition team to discuss him potentially serving as Trump’s director of the National Institutes of Health.
Fauci, a career bureaucrat, had served as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for more than 30 years prior to Trump becoming president.
“I am more and more concerned about even talking to the transition people about being NIH Director since Trump is so unpredictable,” Fauci wrote the week of Jan. 1, 2017.
According to another diary entry dated the day after Trump’s inauguration, Fauci’s wife marched against Trump in Washington while his daughters joined marches protesting Trump in Boston and San Francisco.
By March 2017, Fauci considered Trump’s White House staff “a scary bunch,” saying “Trump and his people are truly unscrupulous. This is outrageous!”
“[T]hey looked like fools on TV and the media, especially Sean Spicer (spokesman) and Kellyanne Conway, who always looks like an idiot,” Fauci wrote.
Elsewhere in his journal, Fauci called Trump’s nominations for Cabinet positions “scary.”
He labeled Trump’s nominee for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, an “anti-environmentalist” for dismissing climate change alarmism. Fauci also opposed the appointment of former Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price for health and human services secretary, saying Price was “against [Obamacare], Medicare/Medicaid, abortion, [and] anti-science.”
During Trump’s time in office, Fauci hoped that left-wing outrage over Trump’s remarks condemning violence from “both sides” of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville spelled “the beginning of the unravelling of the Trump presidency.”
“It is very clear that he is nuts and totally, totally unfit to be POTUS,” Fauci wrote on Aug. 12, 2017. “Let us see what happens in [the] coming days.”
Two years into Trump’s first term, Fauci privately called for Trump’s impeachment as early as January 2019. House Democrats impeached Trump, the first time, almost a year later in December 2019.
Lamenting the partial government shutdown at the time, Fauci was criticizing Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion in federal funding to build the southern border wall.
“Trump insisting on $5 billion for his wall on Mexico border. He is acting more and more bizarre,” Fauci wrote. “Should be impeached, but Dems are rightfully concerned that this will galvanize his base.”
Lauded China
Fauci, meanwhile, was heaping praise on top Chinese health officials.
“Big Chinese visitor day,” Fauci wrote on Sept. 27, 2017, recounting the visit of Dr. Gao Fu, then the director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a Beijing-based agency under control of the Chinese government.
Fauci hosted Gao, a publicly listed member of the Chinese Communist Party, at the NIH that day. “Very smart and nice guy,” Fauci said of Gao.
Afterward, Fauci met with a Chinese delegation, comprised of various CCP members, to debrief them on the NIH’s collaborative work with China.
The foreign delegation included Liu Fandong, the vice premier of China and member of the CCP Central Committee’s political bureau; Li Bin, the minister of China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission and a member of the CCP since 1984; and CCP scholar Dr. Cao Xuetao, the director of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
In January 2019, Fauci expressed skepticism about classified warnings, coming from counter bioterrorism officials, concerning Chinese efforts to steal U.S. technology.
“We discussed at the highest top secret level that the Chinese were stealing our technologies for Ebola vaccines and therapies,” Fauci wrote. “I cannot see why this is so secret. This stuff is in the literature and in clinicaltrials.gov.”
An earlier release of Fauci’s diary entries showed him disregarding concerns around China’s involvement in COVID-19’s creation, even entertaining the formation of a partnership with the Chinese government for what he said would be a joint “good faith” investigation into the origins of the virus.
“[B]ut the environment in the United States is so toxic with regard to China and the delusions of the far right radicals,” Fauci bemoaned, “that it is unlikely that we could come to a collaborative approach with the Chinese to come to a better understanding of the origin of COVID-19.”
FAUCI’S DIARY DETAILS BLOOMING OUTRAGE TOWARD ‘FAR RIGHT’ AND SOFTNESS TOWARD BIDEN AND CHINA
The diary files released this week indicate that there were widespread suspicions on the U.S. side about China stealing sensitive information through the use of Chinese postdoctoral researchers, and it appeared that the Chinese tried to get Fauci to drop those claims.
On Nov. 5, 2018, Fauci recounted a “courtesy visit” from Dr. Chen Wang, the president of CAMS and a former delegate to the CCP’s National Congress. It seems the underlying purpose of the meeting was to lobby Fauci about the United States easing proprietary-theft allegations against China.
“He wanted to firm up collaborations between NIAID and CAMS,” Fauci wrote. “Of note, he mentioned that these were difficult times related to the tension between USA and China regarding the letter from Francis Collins to 10,000 grantees and contractors warning of foreign sources (hinting strongly that these are Chinese) are stealing intellectual property and other trade secrets when their postdocs and trainees come here.”
While he “got along very well” with Wang, Fauci noted that the Chinese delegation translated their conversation, including Fauci’s presentation, into Chinese, though they all spoke English. Fauci said an NIAID official told him to take it as a sign that the Chinese are “not happy with the situation of being accused.”
On Aug. 23, 2018, Fauci journaled about testifying in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for a hearing that discussed China stealing U.S. research data and information technology through Chinese postdoctorates funded by both China and the NIH.
Asked by ranking member Michael Bennet (D-CO) what worries him the most, Fauci said the possibility of a pandemic flu.
“As you probably would have guessed, I always worry about the emergence of an infectious disease, such as we usually use the prototype of pandemic influenza, a respiratory illness that spreads rapidly and that has a high degree of morbidity and mortality,” Fauci testified.
He said it is for that reason that he and his colleagues have been intensively working on, for at least the last decade, the development of a universal influenza vaccine.
Fauci added that he hoped “to be able to immunize children at a very early age like we do with measles, mumps, and rubella to protect them from the possibility of an unexpected catastrophic outbreak like we saw in the pandemics that we have experienced.”