Hello, and welcome to Tuesday, July 29, 2026. Let's see here. Chocolate, chicken wings, and lasagna all on the docket today, so pace yourself. My calendar says it's Milk Chocolate Day, Buffalo Soldiers Day, Waterpark Day, Soccer Day, Hamburger Day, World Hepatitis Day, World Nature Conservation Day, Chicken Wing Day, Tiger Day, and Lasagna Day. Eat a burger, kick a ball, and save room for chocolate. The tiger gets nothing.
Today in History:
1540: King Henry VIII's chief minister Thomas Cromwell is executed, the same day Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.
1655: French dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac, the real-life inspiration for Edmond Rostand's play, dies in Paris. To my mind, there's nothing that comes close to Jose Ferrer playing Cyrano.
1794: Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, is sent to the guillotine.
1821: Peru declares independence from Spain under José de San Martín.
1868: The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is certified and officially adopted, guaranteeing citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the country.
1896: The city of Miami, Fla., is incorporated.
1914: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, setting World War I in motion.
1932: Federal troops forcibly disperse the "Bonus Army" of WWI veterans camped in Washington, demanding early payment of promised bonuses.
1945: The Senate ratifies the United Nations Charter by a vote of 89-2; that same day, an Army bomber crashes into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, killing 14.
1976: A massive earthquake flattens the Tangshan region of China, killing over 242,000 people.
1978: The comedy Animal House opens in theaters.
2002: Nine coal miners trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine in Pennsylvania are rescued after 77 hours underground.
Birthdays Today include: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, journalist and First Lady; Beatrix Potter, author-illustrator (The Tale of Peter Rabbit); Jim Davis, cartoonist (Garfield); Sally Struthers, actor (All in the Family, Gloria); Lori Loughlin, actor (Full House, Fuller House); Dana White, UFC president, businessman; Harry Kane, soccer player; Scott Pelley, journalist (60 Minutes); Riccardo Muti, orchestra conductor; Simon Kirke, drummer (Bad Company, Free); Maha Vajiralongkorn, King of Thailand.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday!
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Sen. Rand Paul just handed America over a thousand pages of receipts. There are four separate stories here, and we need to examine Anthony Fauci’s writings to understand each of them.
Story one: The gap between what he told his diary and what he told us
The Kentucky Republican released Dr. Fauci's personal diary entries this weekend, timed perfectly to land two days before he walks into the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday — under subpoena, not by choice, because Fauci reportedly agreed to testify voluntarily and then quietly backed out. Paul, who chairs that committee, didn't wait for an invitation to get declined twice. He issued the subpoena and set the date himself: Tomorrow, July 29, at 10 a.m.
The diary spans December 2019 through December 2022, the entire arc of Fauci's pandemic reign.
Story two: From these notes, we now know that the wet market theory was off the table almost at once
On Jan. 26, 2020 — five weeks before the World Health Organization ever used the word "pandemic" — Fauci wrote in his own private notes that "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market… Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."
Sit with that for a second. Publicly, for the next year and change, Fauci treated the wet-market theory as the responsible, science-based conclusion, and treated the lab-leak theory as the province of conspiracy theorists and racists, and nearly every institutional voice in America echoed his claims like they were handed down on tablets from the Mountain. Meanwhile, privately, and in his own hand, Fauci had already ruled out the market as the source in January 2020.
Unfortunately, while revealing, this does not of itself expose Fauci to any jail time, given the Biden pardon.
Now, fairness requires I tell you the rest of that same entry: Fauci also wrote, "somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans," which keeps him technically inside zoonotic-origin territory rather than confessing to a lab leak outright. A week later, on Feb. 1, 2020, he logged a conference call with a dozen top researchers who were debating — seriously, internally — whether the virus might not have originated in nature at all.
So no, this isn't a smoking-gun confession that Fauci knew it came from the Wuhan lab and covered it up. What it is, though, is proof that the certainty Fauci projected to the public didn't match the uncertainty in his own notes. Paul put it bluntly on Monday, accusing Fauci of telling his diary one thing while telling America "it's implausible that it came from the lab, and we're really convinced it came from these wild animals in the marketplace." Paul's word for that gap: "astounding" dishonesty. That's Paul's characterization, not Fauci's own words, and it deserves to be labeled as such — but the underlying gap between private hedging and public certainty is right there in Fauci's own handwriting, no spin required. So, Paul has a more than valid point.
By May 2021, that gap had become a headache Fauci was managing rather than a theory he'd settled. "The situation continues to get 'out of control' with regard to the press reports concerning my 'flip flopping' concerning the theory of the origin of the virus," he wrote. Translation: the public was starting to notice the story kept changing, and he knew it.
Story three: He loved being famous. Loved it.
This is the part the diaries make impossible to spin away, because Fauci spins it himself, in real time, with what can only be described as giddiness.
May 21, 2020: "Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washington Post yesterday… Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic." Two days later, the follow-up: "Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world."
Read that again: not "the pandemic is explosive." No, it's "my national and international fame is explosive." While Americans buried relatives and small businesses died by the thousand, the man running point on the federal response sat down at night to log how famous he'd become, and used the word "flattering" to describe it. I wrote at the time that it seemed he was reveling in his stardom. My suspicions are now confirmed.
He wasn't wrong about the fame, either — Joan Baez, Julia Roberts, and Sean Penn all show up in these pages, name-dropped as part of the celebrity orbit that formed around him. The right-leaning press has understandably zeroed in hard on this thread, because it's the easiest one to land: While you were losing your job, Dr. Fauci was cataloguing his magazine profiles.
Here, again, nothing that can be prosecuted, particularly given Biden’s pardon. (Or was it President Otto Penn? Hard to tell.)
Story Four: Trump and Fauci were never quite the team the photo ops suggested
Here's the part that should interest anyone still nursing the theory that Fauci was some heroic truth-teller standing firm against a hostile White House. The diary suggests something messier: a relationship that started warm and curdled fast, with Fauci playing both sides of it, depending on the day.
In that same May 21, 2020, entry, Fauci wrote, "POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship." As I suggested at the time, the spotlight was his bigger concern.
Two months later, on July 13, as the relationship was reportedly already souring, Fauci logged, "Major, major show of support for me for multiple and varied sectors" — a man keeping score of his own approval ratings in the middle of a national emergency.
And then, elsewhere, straight to Trump's face by Fauci's own account: "Tony, we are good, right?" the president asked him. "We are good, Mr. President," Fauci says he answered.
Let's be honest here: That's not the language of a man standing on principle. That's the language of a man managing a boss he didn't fully trust while defending his position and his fame by telling that boss exactly what he wanted to hear.
The Rand Paul feud is the real grudge
If you want to see where Fauci's diary actually gets personal, skip Trump and go straight to his entries about Paul, which read less like a scientist's notes and more like a man venting about his least favorite coworker.
September 2022, after a Senate hearing: Paul was "his usual self asking hostile questions of me saying that I am denying the existence of natural immunity." June 2022, another hearing: Paul was "his usual stupid self asking questions about royalty payments" — referring to Paul's questions about NIH royalty payments, which Fauci apparently considered beneath serious response.
And then the line that ages the worst of anything in this entire release. After Republicans failed to flip the Senate in the 2022 midterms, Fauci wrote with what reads like open relief: "Rand Paul will not have the opportunity to harass me with senate oversight hearings."
Read that one twice. Then remember what happens Wednesday at 10 a.m. in the Dirksen Building. I mean, there's a comment that aged about as well as a puddle in late July heat.
Also for our VIPs: Germany's Example of National and Cultural Suicide Through Lax Immigration
So, where are we going with all of this?
This hearing carries a different kind of weight than Fauci's last few rounds in front of Congress. Any false statement he makes under oath this time falls outside the scope of the pardon Biden (or Otto Penn) gave him on his way out the door — meaning perjury exposure is very much in play, in a way it simply wasn't in 2024.
Paul knows this. Expect him to walk (well, drag, kicking and screaming) Fauci through these diary entries line by line, on the record, under oath, daring him to explain the gap between what he wrote privately and what he swore to publicly. Fauci knows it, too. Expect the tension to be ramped up throughout the hearing.
Fauci has spent three years insisting the record vindicates him. Wednesday, for the first time, he'll have to explain his own diary to the people who subpoenaed it. Of course, he can't be prosecuted for arranging the creation of the virus. The autopen signature on his pardon took that off the table. But as he is 85, lying to Congress, if that's all he gets, will be a life sentence. On the other hand, it may take us the rest of his life to get that far.
Seems to me Fauci is emblematic of how hard it is to prosecute a politically driven figure.
As to this upcoming hearing, popcorn is optional. Paying attention isn't. I'll be watching.
Thought for the Day: A diary doesn't lie to you the way a press conference can — which is exactly why the ones in power would rather you never read theirs.
VIP members: Add your voice to the comments and hit the heart, because it matters.
Take care of yourselves today. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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