Several U.S. Senate Republicans reportedly suffered from diarrhea in July 2026 after filming themselves eating salads to troll Dr. Anthony Fauci after he criticized the party for food regulation cuts.
In late July 2026, people online shared posts in which they claimed several Republican U.S. senators suffered from diarrhea after filming themselves eating salads to troll Dr. Anthony Fauci, a former U.S. health official, after he criticized the GOP for food regulation cuts.
For example, Threads user @thehalfwaypost posted (archived) the rumor as follows:
BREAKING: Several Senate Republicans are reportedly suffering from diarrhea today after they filmed themselves eating salads for lunch to troll Dr. Fauci after Fauci criticized Republican health policies including food regulation cuts and vaccine conspiracy theories.
Some commenters’ remarks reflected that they hoped this rumor — which circulated amid the cyclospora outbreak in summer 2026, in which officials blamed lettuce for sickening thousands of people — was true.
In short, it was not true.
The rumor that Senate Republicans reportedly suffered from diarrhea after attempting to troll Fauci originated from The Halfway Post, a publication identifying itself as satirical in nature. If salads truly had severely sickened the senators, news media outlets would have covered it, and their coverage would have appeared in searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo. That was not the case.
A writer named Dash MacIntyre owns The Halfway Post. He, or another person managing the publication’s accounts, posted the made-up story on July 29 on Facebook (archived), Threads (archived) and X (archived).
(The Halfway Post accessed via Facebook)
The Halfway Post’s Threads bio (archived) reads, “Dadaist graffiti news. Halfway true comedy and satire for your doomscrolling by Dash MacIntyre. I don’t report the facts, I improve them.”
Snopes messaged MacIntyre on X to request further comment from him, in the case he wished to share more information about his writing. We will update this article if we receive further details.
In previous correspondence, MacIntyre directed us to an article he wrote about his “Dada News” content. The story labeled his writing as “absurd for absurdity’s sake,” including saying, in jest, the content “is most politically effective when it compels conservative critics to waste their free time crafting long, laborious responses attacking the integrity, intelligence, and sense of humor of Dada journalists that those Dada journalists do not read and ignore completely.”
For further reading, we previously confirmed a rumor that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under President Donald Trump’s administration, cut surveillance of cyclospora.
