Former President Barack Obama tore into his successor Donald Trump in private as an “idiot” and a “liar,” a secret diary has revealed.
And he privately used the f-word in a way which would inevitably trigger a wave of right-wing criticism for the first Black president.
Obama’s frank thoughts on Trump, and on his son Donald Trump Jr., were recorded by Dr. Tony Fauci in a diary he kept, which was spitefully leaked by anti-vaccine fanatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Obama contacted Fauci to give his support as MAGA attacked the doctor in 2021 for his COVID leadership.
The former president has studiously avoided using Trump’s name in public when criticizing him, but Fauci recorded how he was much franker when speaking privately to offer his support.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who has clashed with Fauci for years, released the pandemic-era journal as he seeks to blame the former chief White House medical adviser for the outbreak of the virus. Paul is also pushing unsubstantiated claims that Fauci was involved in a cover-up to hide U.S. involvement in the coronavirus emerging from an alleged lab leak in China.
Among the pages released was a November 2021 entry revealing the scientist discussing a conversation he had with Obama about the “crazy things that the far-right Republicans” were attacking him over amid the pandemic.
This included Donald Trump Jr. selling merchandise such as T-shirts and sweatshirts on his website featuring the slogan “Fauci Kills Puppies.”
At the time, MAGA supporters were fiercely attacking Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, over misleading claims that the agency had funded cruel experiments on beagles in Tunisia.
The claims, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, alleged that the NIAID backed experiments in which researchers exposed puppies to sand flies while their heads were confined in mesh cages. The journal later issued a correction to the paper in October 2021.
According to Fauci’s diary entry, Obama reassured him that Trump Jr. is “a f---ing moron” before apologizing for using crude language.
“But [Obama] went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar,” Fauci added.
“He was very upset that none of the moderate Republicans were actually speaking out on my behalf and were distancing themselves from all of this terrible, slanderous behavior against me.”
In October 2021, Fauci was bombarded with angry phone calls and threats after false claims spread that he and the NIAID had funded medical experiments on puppies. The situation became so bad that his assistant stopped answering the phone for two weeks after receiving 3,600 calls in just 36 hours, The Washington Post reported.
Fauci has been a MAGA bogeyman for years because of his advocacy for vaccines and his support for mask mandates and lockdowns during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump’s Health Secretary Kennedy has bragged about his role in handing the Fauci diary to Paul, attempting to defend the leak by claiming that they are “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.”
In a Fox News interview, Kennedy boasted about his effort in gathering the files, saying it took “about eight months” and required taking files from “11 separate servers.”
The release of Fauci’s diaries comes as Paul continues his attempt to prosecute Fauci for allegedly misleading the American public about the origins of the virus that killed more than 1.2 million people in the United States, which Fauci strongly denies.
Fauci and Trump also frequently clashed as the pandemic unfolded, with the president repeatedly downplaying the seriousness of the virus during his first term.
On Wednesday, Fauci pleaded the Fifth more than 100 times while being questioned by lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security Committee about the origins of COVID-19.
In his opening remarks before the panel, Fauci lashed out at Paul’s “obsession” with calling for his prosecution, publishing his diary, and making “repeated slanderous” claims about him.
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the offices of Barack Obama and Donald Trump Jr. for comment.
