Fauci's Diary Exposes Shocking Narcissism: Streisand, Julia Roberts and the Bobbleheads

WASHINGTON — The Senate held a hearing this week on the most urgent national security question of our time: what was in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary. The 85-year-old former pandemic chief invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than explain himself — but the damage was already done, because a Republican senator had already released the journals to the public, and they paint a picture of a man so consumed with himself that he tracked his own bobbleheads.

“Dr. Fauci is a narcissist and a megalomaniac,” bellowed one senator, holding up a page of the diary as if it were a smoking gun. And the evidence is damning. On May 13, 2020, Fauci recorded an Instagram exchange with the “absolutely fabulous” Julia Roberts. On another page, he described how Barbra Streisand called him for vaccine advice — and when he told her he listened to her music on his Amazon Alexa, the legendary singer confessed she didn’t know what Alexa was. Fauci then accidentally butt-dialed her, played her music over the speaker, and wrote that she “absolutely loved it!”

This is not a diary. This is a yearbook.

“This man was more concerned with his fame than with the thousands of Americans dying each day,” said Dr. Brett Giroir, a former Trump health official who reviewed the entries. Giroir said he was “shocked by Fauci’s unabashed narcissism” — worrying about favorable media coverage, Brad Pitt playing him on “Saturday Night Live,” a Billy Crystal spoof, and a portrait painted by Joan Baez, when all Giroir and his colleagues were worrying about was the death toll.

Supporters of the hearing argue that a man who wrote about a celebrity acquaintance’s phone call in his private journal, in 2020, during a global pandemic, clearly had his priorities in the wrong place. They note the diary also recorded that author Sally Quinn once told Fauci she based a handsome character in her novel on him, and that Fauci kept pictures of Fauci masks, murals, portraits and bobbleheads. Somewhere in that stack of memorabilia, the argument goes, the science got lost.

But the real scandal, say those who have read the full journals, isn’t what Fauci wrote about himself — it’s who he wrote about, and who he didn’t.

“Look at the names in that diary,” said former Senate staffer and longtime Capitol Hill observer Dale Hartwick. “Barbra Streisand. Julia Roberts. Joan Baez. Jake Tapper. And the President himself, who apparently called Dr. Fauci at 11 p.m. one night just to complain that Ted Cruz’s hair was ‘working against him’ and that Marco Rubio ‘still talks like a little kid.’ You think any of these senators has a diary with entries like that? You think Josh Hawley has ever been complimented by anybody?”

Senator Josh Hawley, who accused Fauci of being on a narcissistic “power trip,” is perhaps the most fascinating case study. Hawley, it should be noted, once raised his fist in solidarity with a crowd of Trump supporters outside the Capitol — a moment he was so proud of that he reportedly had the photograph printed on a coffee mug. The closest Hawley has come to celebrity recognition is being remembered as the man who fled the same crowd he’d just saluted. If anyone knows a power trip when they see one, it’s a man who puts his own fist pump on merchandise.

“Senator Hawley isn’t mad about the diary,” Hartwick said. “He’s mad that nobody wrote a diary about him. Dr. Fauci has an entire leather-bound volume of people saying nice things. Josh Hawley has a mug.”

At press time, Senator Hawley’s office confirmed it had requested a copy of the full diary “for oversight purposes,” and Dr. Fauci was reportedly seen at a Capitol coffee shop autographing a napkin for a staffer, then writing about it in his journal. The hearing continues — because in this town, an old man’s private thoughts about his famous friends are apparently the gravest threat to national security we have left.