Former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said Monday night that he sees a “degree of schizophrenia” in the U.S.
Fauci joined CBS’s “The Late Show,” where host Stephen Colbert asked the doctor if he was going to “diagnose America as a patient right now” what would it be?
“Give it to me straight, doc,” Colbert said.
Fauci said he thinks the late-night host would need a surgeon, not an internist — or a doctor of internal medicine. In reply, Colbert reframed the question, asking what Fauci would say if he were a psychologist.
“There is a degree of schizophrenia in the country,” he said. “It’s just, it really is, I mean, how far apart people can be that they seem to forget how much alike we are, but we’re acting like we’re so, so different.”
Fauci, who served in the Trump and Biden administrations and oversaw the country’s COVID-19 pandemic response, has become an enemy of the right after encouraging people to get vaccinated against the virus.
He has a forthcoming book about working with former President Trump and the expletives the former president said about the pandemic.
Fauci told Colbert he had “a very complicated relationship” with Trump, who is also the presumptive GOP nominee for the White House.
“In the very beginning, we got along very well,” he said, later adding that it was only when the former president began to wish the virus would go away and “he was saying things that were incorrect and I felt strongly that it was not comfortable for me to do it.”
In a recent appearance before Congress, Fauci grew emotional talking about the harassment and death threats he and his family continue to face to this day.
He told Colbert he was not trying to tear Trump down by diverting on pandemic-related messaging, though that’s what many people thought.
“I have a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States that I had to contradict him publicly because he was saying things that were not correct,” Fauci said.
He said the politicization of science recently is “quite new and disturbing.” When Fauci became director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in 1984, he said political ideologies were there, but people were civil.
Now, he added, there’s “vitriol and hostility.