President Donald Trump resurfaced an old video to poke fun at Anthony Fauci’s athletic abilities as the former public health official appears on Capitol Hill Wednesday to testify about the government’s pandemic response.
On Tuesday night, Trump posted a video on Truth Social showing Fauci throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at Nationals Park in Washington in July 2020. The then-79-year-old missed home plate by several feet — an incident he later called a “mishap.”
“Fauci told everyone he was a great basketball player, so I assumed that he would be easily able to throw a ball to Home Plate,” Trump wrote. “It turned out that he was a phony on that, just like he was on everything else…”
“He was a terrible ‘athlete,’ and this is, by far, the worst throw I have ever seen in years of watching first pitches,” the president added.
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped lead Trump’s response to the pandemic, making him a household name. Trump initially praised him, but later turned on him as pandemic restrictions triggered backlash from conservatives. “I grew tired of him…he wanted to close everything down,” the president told Fox News this week.
Fauci has pleaded the Fifth as he is going before a Senate committee to talk about the origins of Covid-19 and the federal government’s response. Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, subpoenaed the former public health official, accusing him of knowingly misleading the public about the origins of the disease — an allegation Fauci has called “preposterous.”
Ahead of Wednesday’s testimony, attorneys for Fauci called Paul’s allegations “absolutely baseless” and part and parcel of an “obsessive and groundless vendetta.” Over 100 infectious disease experts have also come out in defense of Fauci, claiming there is "no credible evidence" backing up the allegations against him.
Earlier this month, Paul released what he described as Fauci’s diary from his years at the institute, arguing the more than 1,000-page document exposes a divide between Fauci’s private beliefs and his public remarks.
In a 2020 diary entry, Fauci wrote that there was no scientific consensus on the origins of Covid-19, including whether it stemmed from a lab leak or natural spillover. He said that 10 of the 12 scientists he consulted “felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” At the time, Fauci said publicly that natural spillover was the most likely scenario.
“We've probably never ever seen people so completely at odds with their private thoughts, and then publicly proclaiming the opposite of what they were truly saying in private,” Paul, who has long amplified the lab leak theory, told reporters this week.
The diary entries, which date from 2019 to 2022, also reveal that Fauci grew increasingly frustrated with Trump during the early days of the pandemic. The former public health official repeatedly vented about Trump’s “rambling” and compared the president to an “obnoxious adolescent.”
Other entries indicate Fauci was preoccupied with his pandemic-era fame.
At one point, he wrote, “It is not [hyperbolic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable [person] in the world.”
Fauci, who worked under seven presidents, stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 2022.
In 2025, Trump ended Fauci’s federal security detail, making him one of several former aides-turned-critics whose government protection was revoked. At the time, Trump told reporters he would not feel responsible if harm came to former officials.
