Most people, when they want to make a point about someone, don’t reach back six years to dig up a bad baseball throw. But that’s exactly what President Trump did this week. On Tuesday, July 29, the 80-year-old president resurfaced a clip of Dr. Anthony Fauci throwing out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game from July 23, 2020. The ball sailed short and to the left of home plate. Trump posted it on Truth Social like it was breaking news.
The timing was not random. The video landed in the middle of a much bigger story, one that had Trump doing multiple TV hits and firing off posts all in the same 48 hours. Here’s what actually set him off, and why an old pitch became his weapon of choice.
The pitch that would not die
Let’s set the scene on the actual throw. It was pandemic-delayed Opening Day in 2020. The Nationals were hosting the Yankees in an empty stadium. Fauci, who was 79 at the time, walked out to the mound wearing a mask, wound up, and put the ball nowhere near where it was supposed to go. It became a running joke that summer.
Fast forward six years. On July 24, 2026, exactly six years to the day after the pitch, a Fox-owned sports site ran an anniversary piece calling it one of the worst throws in baseball history. That piece was floating around conservative media right as the rest of the Fauci news cycle was heating up. Five days later, Trump grabbed the clip and ran with it.
His caption did the heavy lifting. “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,” Trump wrote. “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!”
Small problem. Fauci never claimed to be a great baseball player. He did play basketball in his youth, but throwing a strike from a pitcher’s mound and hitting a jump shot are two different skills. Trump mashed them together anyway.
What really lit the fuse: the diary
The baseball post wasn’t about baseball. It was about a stack of paper. Over the weekend of July 25, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) dumped a huge tranche of Fauci’s personal journals onto the public. We’re talking a 1,141-page document covering December 2019 through December 2022, which is when Fauci stepped down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, posted the pages on X on Saturday. His pitch to the public was simple. “What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories,” Paul wrote. He wasn’t shy about his expectations either, telling Fox Business, “I expect he will not tell the truth. I don’t expect him to be honest, he hasn’t been honest in the last six years.”
So the diary drop, the anniversary of the bad pitch, and a looming Senate showdown all hit at the same moment. That’s the pile of kindling. Trump’s Truth Social post was the match.
The line that probably stung the most
If you read what was actually in those journals, it’s not hard to see why Trump got personal. Fauci wrote that he and Trump started off with a decent working relationship, but he eventually came to see the president as an “obnoxious adolescent.” He also complained in private about Trump’s “rambling.”
Put yourself in Trump’s shoes for a second. A guy who once stood next to you at daily briefings on live TV was writing in his notebook that you talked too much and acted like a teenager. Then that notebook gets published for the whole country to read. Digging up a six-year-old video where the same guy air-mails a baseball starts to look less like commentary and more like payback.
Fauci wrote a lot about being famous
The other thing in the diary that gave critics ammunition was how much Fauci wrote about his own celebrity. In a May 2020 entry, he described his “situation with my national and international fame” as “explosive and really unimaginable.” He mused that he might be “the most famous” and most talked-about person in the country, pointing to a front-page Washington Post story and magazine profiles written about him.
He also admitted the attention was “flattering,” and noted that Trump’s White House was not thrilled that he kept getting all the press. That’s the kind of detail that plays badly no matter who you are. It reads like a man who liked the spotlight, which is exactly the story Rand Paul wanted people walking away with.
The journals didn’t spare Paul either. Fauci called him “his usual stupid self” over questions about royalty payments in a June 2022 hearing, and after Republicans lost the 2022 midterms, Fauci wrote that Paul “will not have the opportunity to harass me with senate oversight hearings.” That prediction aged poorly.
Trump on Fox: “I grew tired of him”
The same day the baseball clip went up, Trump was talking about Fauci everywhere. On “Fox & Friends,” he said, “He was a much bigger player in the Biden administration. I grew tired of him. He wanted to close everything down. I allowed it to be up to the governors,” adding that “many of the Republican governors didn’t want to close.”
He kept going in another Fox hit, telling Steve Doocy that Fauci had way more pull under Biden. “When he was with Biden, he was like the God. When he was with me, he wasn’t even close,” Trump said. He also claimed he would have fired Fauci during the pandemic if he’d known then what he knows now.
Trump zeroed in on the shifting mask guidance. “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,” he said. Say what you want, but the mask flip-flopping is one of the sticking points that never really went away for a lot of people.
Fauci got dragged to the Hill by subpoena
Here’s a piece a lot of the noise buried. Fauci, now 85, did not walk into this hearing willingly. He got there because Paul subpoenaed him back in June. The hearing was set for 10:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, July 29, before Paul’s committee, and everyone expected it to get combative.
This is not new territory for Fauci. Over his long career, he has testified before Congress roughly 250 times, on everything from HIV/AIDS to Ebola. But this appearance was different. It was only his second public congressional appearance since leaving government, and his first ever before Paul’s committee since the diary got released. So he walked in already on defense.
The old fight between these two centers on where COVID came from. Paul has argued for years that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, and that taxpayer-funded research at the NIAID played a role. Fauci has denied that over and over. One diary entry from August 24, 2021 captures how sick of the whole thing he was: “More conspiracy theory like letters keep coming in from congressmen and senators trying to link us to the origin of COVID-19. This is an amazing and unbelievable waste of our time.” Paul’s answer to that? He called it oversight, not a waste.
Why the old clip actually made sense as a move
Strip away the personalities and here’s the real story. A senator released 1,000-plus pages of a private diary right before a subpoenaed witness had to testify. The witness had privately mocked the sitting president. And the president, instead of engaging on the substance, reached for the single most embarrassing piece of footage he could find and posted it hours before the hearing.
It’s petty, sure. But it’s also strategic in the way these things usually are. A dense diary about pandemic policy is hard to explain in a sentence. A guy chucking a baseball into the dirt is instant. One is a policy argument. The other is a punchline that anybody can share in three seconds.
Fauci’s supporters saw it differently. They argued the diary just showed a scientist trying to do his job under an impossible boss. Trump’s people saw a man who craved fame and told the country one thing while writing another. Both sides read the same 1,141 pages and walked away certain they were right. That’s pretty much been the story of these two for six years running, and the diary release just cranked it back up to full volume.
One thing’s for sure. A bad first pitch from 2020 is now permanently attached to a Senate hearing in 2026, and neither of these men seems ready to let the other one go.
