Anderson Cooper AC360| Stephen Colbert Interview

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Anderson Cooper discusses grief, loss, religion, and politics in this moving interview with Stephen Colbert.

Anderson Cooper| AC360 | Stephen Colbert Interview (Transcript)
Length: 39 mins

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Anderson Cooper: ÔøΩ have quoted, with great reverence. It would be an outrage. People's heads would explode, understandably, because it is a fundamental, bedrock marker of who we are.

Stephen Colbert: Yes. There is our physical constitution and then there is our physical Bill of Rights, and there's the physical Declaration of Independence, but there's also this emotional constitution that America has. There's an emotional reality that we all share that makes us all Americans and one of them is things like The New Colossus, the poem that Emma Lazarus wrote, it's on the Statue of Liberty. We're constantly being told, by this administration,  "You don't see what you see. You don't hear what you hear." Now they're saying you don't feel what you feel. You don't actually feel that. You don't actually believe that this is a nation of immigrants.

Anderson Cooper: You called President Trump, I think, a heretic to reality.

Stephen Colbert: A heretic to reality. As raised a Catholic, you know, the greatest sin is actually heresy because not only are you astray from the right path, you're inviting, you're encouraging other people to come with you on that path. Specifically, heresy is like proselytizing for the devil.

Anderson Cooper: And the punishment for heretics is sort of the most extraordinary.

Stephen Colbert: I think it's red-hot iron coffins in Dante's Inferno. The area is called Dis, I think that's the part of the level of hell that they're in, so it's just pretty bad.

Anderson Cooper: It doesn't get much worse than a red-hot iron coffin.

Stephen Colbert: Yeah. The worst spa treatment. And he, our president, wants to live in a fantasy world where only the way he perceives the world is is the way it is and only the things that sort of serve his vision. And he's also trying to convince us that that is the only world that exists. It's extremely solipsistic, but he's also trying to invite us into this madness that he has and that's heresy against reality. That is proselytizing for the most selfish and the basest instincts that the American people, like all people, have, but he is not appealing to the better angels of our nature.

Anderson Cooper: I've heard you say that the thesis of your show has become, essentially, hey, you're not crazy.

Stephen Colbert: Right, right. The audience is not crazy. How you feel is actually how you feel, how you think is actually how you think. What you see is actually happening, what you hear is actually what he said.

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