She was in the Situation Room with him. She was in the Oval Office with him. She had phone calls with him. Then-Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany spent the darkest period of the pandemic steps away from Dr. Anthony Fauci, defending the administration’s reopening push from the White House podium — using the same science Fauci himself was citing publicly.
Now she’s read his diaries. And she wants everyone to understand what he was writing privately while she was out front defending the position he gave her.
On July 9, 2020, McEnany made the public case for reopening schools with data that came from every major public health institution in the country. The CDC director said children were minimally affected by COVID. McKinsey warned closures would hit students of color hardest. HHS noted that one-fifth of all child abuse reports came through schools — abuse that would go unreported with schools closed. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned of real child mortality from prolonged closures. Fauci himself had recently written in his own diary that America risked more excess deaths from measles — because children weren’t getting vaccinated — than from COVID.
That was May. Two months later, he was privately writing that Trump “does not care about the safety of the children” because the president was pushing to reopen schools.
Two months. The same science. Completely opposite private conclusions.
This is the document trail that proves what millions of Americans already suspected: Fauci was performing for the public while writing something entirely different in private. The diary shows a man who understood the real costs of school closures — the missed vaccinations, the unreported abuse, the developmental damage to a generation of children — and who was simultaneously using those closures as leverage in a political conflict with the administration he served.
McEnany called it “indeed a crime” that Americans still don’t have answers. She is right. The damage from Fauci’s pandemic decisions is documented and irreversible. Children lost years of learning and social development. Small businesses were destroyed permanently. The mental health crisis among American adolescents that followed was predictable, predicted, and ignored because the man running the federal response was more interested in his running feud with the White House than in the full cost of the policies he was championing.
He refused to answer questions about any of this under oath. He pleaded the Fifth 111 times. His wife flipped off a photographer after the contempt vote. His lawyer is still calling congressional scrutiny a “political stunt.”
McEnany was in the room. She did the work. She defended positions she was told were scientifically supported by the man she was defending. And then she read what he was actually writing at the same time.
“The American people deserve answers.”
They do. They’ve deserved them for six years. The contempt referral is with the DOJ. The investigation continues. The diary is 1,000 pages long.
The answers are coming. The question is whether Fauci can keep hiding them.
