Kayleigh McEnany spent the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic just steps from Dr. Anthony Fauci while serving as White House press secretary during President Donald Trump's first term. Now, after digging into Fauci's newly revealed diaries, she says the American people got played.
"I was in the Situation Room with Dr. Fauci, I was in the Oval Office with Dr. Fauci, I had phone calls with Dr. Fauci. I spent a lot of time with this man," McEnany said on The Five on Fox News. "And I'm very frustrated because the American people deserve answers."
She's not wrong to be frustrated.
McEnany said she’s been working through Fauci’s diaries, which total more than 1,000 pages, and comparing them with what she knew at the time. She cited what she said from the White House podium on July 9, 2020. Back then, she made the case for reopening schools using the experts everyone claimed to trust. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director had said kids were minimally affected by COVID-19 and that 22 million kids depended on school for their meals. McKinsey & Company had warned that closures would hit students of color hardest. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) found that one-fifth of all reported child abuse cases came through schools, and without schools open, that avenue of reporting would be gone. The American Academy of Pediatrics had warned of real morbidity and mortality in kids kept home.
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Here's the part that should make your blood boil. At that same moment, while McEnany made her case publicly with real data behind her, Fauci was privately trashing the entire effort in his own diary.
"Bob Redfield, the CDC director, was defending the school CDC guidance of opening schools. Clearly, President Trump does not care about the safety of the children," Fauci wrote, according to McEnany.
Two months earlier, Fauci had written in that very diary that kids weren't getting their measles vaccinations and that the country could end up seeing more excess deaths from measles than from COVID. Two months later, he was privately mocking the push to reopen schools, the same push backed by the science he himself had cited just weeks before.
Make no mistake about it, Fauci said one thing to the cameras while writing something entirely different in his diary, all while Americans made life-altering decisions based on his public word.
“I spent a LOT of time with this man, and I’m very frustrated because the American people deserve answers!” @kayleighmcenany calls out Dr. Fauci over what she says are glaring contradictions in his COVID-era diaries, especially on reopening schools: “Americans deserve ANSWERS.” pic.twitter.com/N7uGPCleRs
— The Five (@TheFive) August 6, 2026
The COVID-19 pandemic feels like a fever dream now. Six years later, it's almost impossible to believe any of it actually happened: the lockdowns, the shuttered schools, the toilet paper craze, the stupid barriers at supermarkets, the masked toddlers, and the businesses destroyed overnight.
But it did happen.
Kids lost a year or more of learning and social development they will never get back. Small businesses were destroyed. All of what happened was because of Fauci, the architect of the federal response. He shaped nearly every decision.
McEnany called it "indeed a crime" that Americans still haven't gotten the answers they're owed. She's right. Fauci steered the nation's pandemic response, and his own written words now show he wasn't being straight with the public he served the entire time.
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