Former White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci signed 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 now,” what would that be?
“Tell me frankly, doctor,” said Colbert.
Fauci said he thinks the late-night host would need a surgeon, not an internist — or an internal medicine doctor. In response, Colbert rephrased the question, asking what Fauci would say if he were a psychologist.
“There is a certain degree of schizophrenia in the country,” he said. “It’s just that it really is, I mean, how far apart people can be that they seem to forget how similar we are, but we’re acting like we’re so, so different.”
Fauci, who served in the Trump and Biden administrations and oversaw the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has become an enemy of the right after encouraging people to get vaccinated against the virus.
He has a book coming out soon about working with former President Trump and the bad words the former president said about the pandemic.
Fauci told Colbert he had “a very complicated relationship” with Trump, who is also the presumptive Republican nominee for the White House.
“In the beginning, we got along very well,” he said, adding later 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 very strongly that it was not comfortable for me to do this.”
In a recent appearance before Congress, Fauci became emotional as he spoke about the harassment and death threats he and his family continue to face to this day.
He told Colbert he wasn’t trying to take down Trump by diverting messages related to the pandemic, although that’s what many people thought.
“I have a lot of respect for the presidency of the United States and I had to publicly contradict him 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 Diseases in 1984, he said political ideologies existed, but people were civilized.
Now, he added, there is “aggression and hostility.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
