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Trump Mocks Fauci’s Baseball Skills Ahead of Testimony: ‘Phony
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. President Donald Trump has again mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci’s baseball skills, hours before Fauci is set to testify before a Senate committee on Wednesday.
"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 on Truth Social on Tuesday night, alongside a clip of Fauci’s errant ceremonial first pitch at Major League Baseball’s season opener in July 2020.
"It turned out that he was a phony on that, just like he was on everything else."
Trump, 80, added that Fauci 85, "was a terrible ‘athlete,’ and this is, by far, the worst throw I have ever seen in years of watching first pitches!"
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped coordinate the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He raised Trump’s ire during his first term when he resisted Trump’s untested public health notions.
Fauci is set to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday morning, days after the committee’s chairman, Senator Rand Paul, released thousands of pages of Fauci’s diary entries from during the pandemic.
The testimony will be among Fauci's highest-profile public appearances since leaving government in 2022 and is expected to draw renewed scrutiny of some of the most contentious debates of the pandemic.
"If Anthony Fauci comes before my committee tomorrow and perjures himself, his preemptive pardon from Joe Biden will not protect him," Paul wrote on X on Tuesday.
Paul has clashed repeatedly with Fauci over the government’s COVID-19 policies and accused Fauci of covering up the origins of COVID-19, which Fauci has consistently denied.
Fauci was among those who were issued preemptive pardons by former President Joe Biden before he left office last year, as a guard against potential attacks by the incoming Trump administration.
At the time, Biden said the pardons should not be "mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing" or that acceptance of them should be "misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense."
He said those issued pardons "have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions."
Trump discredited Fauci, on Tuesday morning. In reference to Fauci's botched ceremonial first pitch during the Major League Baseball's season opener in July, Trump tweeted that the doctor's "pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications."
The errant Opening Day pitch by Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, went viral after he completely missed his target, Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle.
Fauci’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will begin at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday.
Viewers can watch a livestream of the hearing on the C-SPAN or Senate website.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Tobias Meyjes and Tony Phillips
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