photo #9316371

Rand Paul wanted a gotcha. Instead, he gave us a bad Yelp review. This week, the Kentucky Republican released more than 1,000 pages of Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary, covering the period from December 2019 until Fauci left government in 2022. Paul claims the entries prove that what Fauci wrote privately and what he told the public were “two different stories.” Republicans hoped the release would expose a sinister mastermind secretly engineering shutdowns, masks and assorted crimes against MAGA. What the diaries exposed was Fauci’s private assessment of the man trying and failing to lead the country through a deadly pandemic. The entries describe a president fixated on television ratings and reelection, resistant to warnings about the virus and eager to reopen the country while cases were climbing. In one early entry, Fauci wrote that he urged Trump not to minimize the danger — only to watch him downplay it again the following day. To be clear, the diaries contain much more than insults. They record the uncertainty of a fast-moving crisis, debates over schools and masks, questions about the virus’s origin, Fauci’s sudden celebrity and his increasingly bitter clashes with Trump and Paul. Those questions deserve serious examination. But if the objective of this particular release was to make Fauci look reckless or unhinged, publishing his contemporaneous descriptions of Donald Trump was… an interesting strategic choice. Congratulations to Rand Paul on releasing more than 1,000 pages of evidence that at least one person in the Trump administration was paying attention.