Avi Selk, Kristine Guerra February 20, 2017
photo above:
The reporter who helped expose an infamously paranoid, manipulative and destructive president said Sunday that Richard Nixon had nothing on Donald Trump.
“Trump’s attacks on the American press as ‘enemies of the American people’ are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s attacks on the press,” former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein said Sunday on CNN.
Trump’s comments — made publicly, whereas Nixon attacked his enemies in private — brought to mind “dictators and authoritarians, including Stalin, including Hitler,” Bernstein said.
He immediately walked back a comparison to the Nazi leader, while doubling down on the comparison to Nixon.
Bernstein — whose reporting of the Watergate break-in and cover-up helped bring about Nixon’s resignation — said Trump’s rhetoric is potentially more dangerous than Nixon’s attacks on the news media.
“There is no civic consensus in this country like there was at the time of Watergate about acceptable presidential conduct,” Bernstein said on “Reliable Sources.”
“Trump is out there on his own, leading a demagogic attack on the institutions of free democracy,” he said. “We are into terrible authoritarian tendencies.”
Bernstein’s words echoed others who spoke out Sunday, after Trump escalated his months-long war on reporters with a single tweet.
Please click on: Trump More Dangerous Than Nixon
