Newly released diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci reveal years of private criticism directed at President Donald Trump, including calls for his impeachment and declarations that he was unfit for office, while the longtime federal health official documented cordial interactions with senior Chinese health officials.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released the records Wednesday, highlighting Fauci’s political views dating back to the 2016 presidential campaign. Paul accused the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of exhibiting what he called “early-onset Trump Derangement Syndrome,” arguing that the entries demonstrate Fauci’s hostility toward Trump long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Trump made a fool of himself,” Fauci wrote on Sept. 28, 2016, following Trump’s first presidential debate against then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. After Trump won the election, Fauci expressed reservations about meeting with the incoming administration over a potential appointment as director of the National Institutes of Health. “I am more and more concerned about even talking to the transition people about being NIH Director since Trump is so unpredictable,” he wrote in January 2017.

Fauci, who had led NIAID since 1984, also recorded his family’s participation in anti-Trump demonstrations. He noted that his wife marched in Washington, while his daughters attended protests in Boston and San Francisco. By March 2017, he referred to White House officials as “a scary bunch” and wrote, “Trump and his people are truly unscrupulous. This is outrageous!” He criticized then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer and adviser Kellyanne Conway, saying they “looked like fools on TV and the media,” and labeled Cabinet picks such as former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt an “anti-environmentalist” and former HHS Secretary Tom Price “anti-science.”

Following the 2017 Charlottesville rally, Fauci wrote that Trump was “nuts and totally, totally unfit to be POTUS” and hoped the controversy would mark “the beginning of the unravelling of the Trump presidency.” In January 2019, during a partial government shutdown over border wall funding, he wrote that Trump was “acting more and more bizarre” and “Should be impeached, but Dems are rightfully concerned that this will galvanize his base.”

The entries also document Fauci’s meetings with senior Chinese health officials. On Sept. 27, 2017, he described a meeting with Gao Fu, then director-general of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention and a Chinese Communist Party member, as a “Big Chinese visitor day” and called Gao a “Very smart and nice guy.” He recorded discussions of scientific cooperation between the NIH and Beijing. In January 2019, he wrote about classified discussions concerning alleged Chinese theft of U.S. Ebola vaccine technology, questioning why the matter was kept secret when related information appeared in public literature and clinicaltrials.gov.

The excerpts show Fauci privately expressing intense opposition to Trump while maintaining a cordial tone toward at least some senior Chinese health officials. The entries alone do not establish that Fauci acted improperly in his dealings with Chinese officials or that his political views influenced his scientific decisions. Paul’s release of the records is likely to renew scrutiny of Fauci’s conduct during his decades in government, including his relationship with successive administrations and his handling of the COVID-19 response.