@tiredofthishit2026
Anthony Fauci’s diary, in his own words, provides ample reason to conclude that this man became intoxicated by attention, obsessed with his public image, and disturbingly comfortable turning a national catastrophe into an Anthony Fauci celebrity show. While you were locked away in your home, glued to the television for answers, waiting by the phone for news of loved ones isolated from society, Fauci was basking in his status as an international celebrity.
On March 10, 2020, Fauci wrote, “For better or worse, I am becoming an international celebrity.” Twelve days later, while Americans were losing jobs and watching their businesses collapse, he recorded that the “press is going wild with me.” He then marveled that doughnuts were being named after him, T-shirts carried his face, songs were being dedicated to him, and celebrities such as Trevor Noah and Steph Curry wanted his time.
By May, the self-admiration had become impossible to miss. Fauci wrote that his fame was “explosive and really unimaginable,” adding that he was “the most famous and talked about person in the country.” Who writes that about himself during a mass-casualty emergency? He carefully documented his television profiles, invitations, celebrity encounters, praise from journalists, and even an invitation to appear on Dancing with the Stars. The country was terrified, children were locked out of schools, elderly people were dying alone, and Fauci was keeping a scrapbook of his own stardom.
His entry about Julia Roberts is particularly revealing. He recalled her exclaiming, “Oh my God. It’s Dr. Fauci,” calling him her personal hero, and expressing her delight at speaking with him. He did not merely record the policy discussion; he preserved every drop of praise. The diary repeatedly reads less like the working notes of a dispassionate scientist and more like the journal of a man thrilled that Hollywood had finally discovered him.
The media devoured the Fauci spectacle because he provided exactly what it wanted: a government official willing to sanctify its preferred narrative while treating dissenters as ignorant or dangerous. He appeared across television networks, newspapers, international publications, and glossy magazines, including a special InStyle digital cover photographed poolside in sunglasses while the country remained under pandemic restrictions. Time placed him among its 100 most influential people, Saturday Night Live had Brad Pitt portray him, documentary filmmakers celebrated him, and journalists treated access to him as though they were interviewing a movie star. The press did not scrutinize Fauci as a powerful federal bureaucrat whose decisions affected hundreds of millions of lives; it built a personality cult around him and then attacked anyone who refused to kneel before “America’s doctor.”
The diary contains even more evidence of how completely Fauci came to view himself as the central figure on Earth. On March 22, 2020, he marveled that there were “many print profiles and features on me” and that the “press is going wild with me.” Days later, he catalogued the doughnuts, T-shirts, songs, celebrity calls, and television appearances created in his honor, while in April he wrote that the press remained “hot and heavy about me” and saved a link to an Atlantic story titled “Why America Is Thirsty for Anthony Fauci.”
By May, Fauci declared that it was not hyperbole to call himself “the most famous and talked about person in the country” and “one of the most recognizable” people in the world. Even at the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2022, he recorded being “completely swamped” by people yelling his name and applauding, adding that he was amazed his recognition had reached “such a height.” This was not a passing observation about unwanted publicity; it was a meticulous, almost compulsive inventory of his own importance, written by a man who seemed unable to encounter a compliment, celebrity, magazine profile, or cheering crowd without preserving it for posterity.
Fauci later insisted that he was “certainly not getting a big head,” which is precisely the sort of sentence people write after devoting page after page to how famous, admired, recognizable, and important they have become. This does not prove a clinical personality disorder, but it displays the traits ordinary people associate with extreme narcissism: grandiosity, hunger for admiration, hypersensitivity to criticism, contempt for opponents, and relentless attention to personal status.
The sickest part of this story is that Fauci’s celebrity required the pandemic to continue dominating public life. Every new restriction, frightening prediction, television interview, and conflict with Trump kept him at the center of the national drama. He became more than a bureaucrat; the media transformed him into an untouchable secular saint, and his diary strongly suggests that he loved every minute of it. Americans were ordered to sacrifice their livelihoods, freedom, education, and family relationships while the man presented as “the science” sat behind closed doors recording just how famous the suffering had made him.
