Trump Attacks Fauci Over Six-Year-Old First Pitch Video

On Tuesday, the President of the United States, 80 years old, logged onto his social media account and posted a baseball clip from 2020. Not a policy statement. Not a document. A six-year-old video of a man throwing a ball badly at an empty stadium.

That man was Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the throw has been mocked for years. But the timing here is the interesting part. Trump didn't just stumble across an old video. He pulled it out at the exact moment Fauci was back in the headlines for something a lot more serious than a wild pitch. Let me walk you through what actually happened, because the whole thing is stranger than the clip itself.

The Post That Started It

Here is what Trump wrote on Truth Social: "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. 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!"

He attached the old video and hit post. One small problem with the logic: Fauci never claimed to be a great baseball player. Basketball, maybe, back in his high school days. But nobody, including Fauci, ever pretended he had a cannon for an arm. Still, the baseball throw became a stand-in for attacking Fauci's credibility on everything else. If he can't hit home plate, the thinking goes, why trust anything he said?

Why He Dug It Up Right Now

This post didn't come out of nowhere. Days earlier, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky dumped a giant pile of Fauci's private diary entries onto the internet. We're talking about roughly 1,141 pages of journal writing and related documents, covering December 2019 through December 2022.

Paul runs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and he released the material as part of his ongoing fight with Fauci over how the pandemic was handled. The diary release was timed on purpose. Fauci had a Senate hearing coming up fast, and Paul wanted the pages out in public first. So the video post landed right in the middle of a huge Fauci news week. That's not a coincidence.

What Fauci Actually Wrote in the Diary

This is where it gets juicy, and honestly, it explains why Trump reacted the way he did. The diary starts out warm. Fauci wrote that early on, Trump directed questions to him constantly during White House meetings, called him "the smartest person in the world," and told him "We are counting on you." Fauci even noted that Trump seemed "enamored" with him as his fame grew.

Then it soured. As the pandemic dragged on, Fauci privately described Trump as an "obnoxious adolescent" and complained about his "rambling." He also seemed to love the spotlight. The entries mention Fauci bobbleheads, beers named after him, an Instagram Live chat with Steph Curry, and articles about public "thirst" for him. Reading the full entries, you can see a guy trying to do his job while also very much enjoying being famous. Calling Trump an obnoxious adolescent, though? That's the kind of line that guarantees a response.

The Fox Interview That Went With It

The baseball post wasn't a one-off. That same day, Trump went on "Fox & Friends" and unloaded. "He was a much bigger player in the Biden administration. I grew tired of him," Trump said. "He wanted to close everything down. I allowed it to be up to the governors."

He hit the mask flip-flops too. "He started off saying, Don't wear them. Then he said, Wear them. Then he said, Don't wear them. And I lost a lot of respect for him during the period of time." The best line came near the end. "When he was with Biden, he was like the God," Trump said. "When he was with me, he wasn't even close." He also said he would have fired Fauci back then if he'd known what he knows now. So the video, the interview, and the diary all hit within about 24 hours. This was a full-court press, not a random Tuesday rant.

The Pitch That Refuses to Die

Let's talk about the actual throw, because it really was rough. On July 23, 2020, Fauci was tapped to throw the ceremonial first pitch for the pandemic-delayed Opening Day between the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees. The stadium was nearly empty. He wore a mask. He reared back and the ball sailed way short and off to the left. The catcher had to go chase it down.

Fauci was 79 at the time, and he owned it, later calling the throw "quite embarrassing." He'd even gotten pitching tips from Nationals star Ryan Zimmerman the day before. Zimmerman tried to calm his nerves by pointing out there'd be no fans watching. That advice did not help. The pitch became one of those weird little snapshots of the entire 2020 summer, an empty ballpark and a nervous scientist throwing a ball into the dirt.

Trump Already Made Fun of This in 2020

Here's a detail that makes the 2026 post even funnier. Trump already mocked this exact pitch six years ago. Back in October 2020, during his first term, he tweeted, "Actually, Tony's pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications." So this is round two of the same joke, recycled and reposted.

And there's a fun twist from back then. Around that same time, Trump claimed the Yankees had invited HIM to throw out a first pitch, an announcement that reportedly caught the Yankees organization off guard. The retrospective piece that ran on the sixth anniversary of Fauci's throw almost certainly helped put the clip back in front of Trump. So the media chain looks like this: an anniversary article, a diary dump, and then a President reposting a video he already joked about half a decade ago. It's a loop.

The Real Showdown Is the Senate Hearing

While everyone was watching Trump post a baseball video, the actual news was Fauci heading back to Congress. He was scheduled to testify before Paul's committee on July 30, 2026. He didn't want to go. Paul subpoenaed him after Fauci told the committee he wouldn't show up voluntarily.

The questions lined up for that hearing are serious. Paul has spent years accusing Fauci of greenlighting risky virus research and of telling staff to use private email channels to dodge public records requests. According to material from Paul's official office, the diary shows that as early as January 31, 2020, Fauci was told by top virologists that the virus's structure raised real doubts about a natural origin, with about half the scientists on an early call thinking it looked "constructed." Paul's committee argues Fauci then spent years publicly dismissing the lab leak idea anyway. Separately, a senior NIAID adviser named David Morens was indicted for concealing and deleting federal records.

The diary also had shots at Paul himself. Fauci wrote that during one 2022 Senate appearance, Paul was "his usual self asking hostile questions of me." And when Republicans lost the Senate in the 2022 midterms, Fauci noted that Paul "will not have the opportunity to harass me with senate oversight hearings." Turns out he got that one wrong.

So What's the Takeaway Here

Strip away the noise and you've got two guys who have been circling each other for six years, still going at it. One released a thousand pages of private journals. The other responded by posting a bad baseball throw. That contrast pretty much sums up the whole feud.

The diary itself, read straight through, shows a man who was equal parts frustrated public servant and fame chaser. The entries mention Julia Roberts, Hunter Biden, Larry Ellison, and a whole cast of famous names Fauci crossed paths with. That's a lot of material for a serious Senate investigation. And out of all of it, the thing the President chose to lead with was a first pitch from 2020. Whatever else you think about any of this, that choice tells you exactly what kind of week it was in Washington.