A journalist known for his coverage of former President Richard Nixon amid the Watergate scandal is now accusing former President Donald Trump of being a “war criminal.”
Carl Bernstein, a frequent Trump critic who, along with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, accused Trump of a “delusional madness” that is “on a scale and a scope we have never experienced in an American president in our history.”
“I think we need to calmly step back and maybe look at Trump in a different context,” he said on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter Sunday. “He is our own American war criminal of a kind we’ve never experienced before.”
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Bernstein alleged Trump “transcends the political,” prioritizing his own electoral future in a manner “so extraordinary in our history.”
“I think what we’re talking about, Trump’s crimes as an American war criminal in his own country that he has perpetrated upon our people, including the tens of thousands of people who died because of his homicidal negligence in the pandemic, putting his own electoral interest above the health of our people when they were slaughtered during this pandemic,” he continued. “Looking at his actions in terms of fomenting a coup in which to hold on to office in which the head of the American military, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff has now compared Trump — not the press, not reporters comparing Trump to Hitler — but rather the head of the American military comparing him and his movement to brownshirts, to the Reichstag fire. This is a huge wake-up call to this country when Gen. Milley, the head of the American military, has said this.”
Trump has been accused by many on the Left of downplaying the impact of the coronavirus, a virus that was responsible for more than 600,000 U.S. deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Supporters of the former president have argued the response from Democratic officials, including implementing mask mandates and stringent COVID-19 protocols, has hampered economic recovery efforts and infringed on personal liberties.
On Jan. 6 — which Trump previously teased would be an “important date” in a December 2020 call with a Georgia official, according to multiple outlets — the then-president held a “Stop the Steal” rally alleging widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential contest. The rally morphed into a mob storming the Capitol, an incident currently the subject of several investigations and prosecutions.
Trump was impeached in the House for his words and actions preceding the attack, with 10 Republicans voting in support of the charge of inciting an insurrection. The former president was then acquitted in the Senate, despite seven GOP senators joining all Democrats to vote in favor of convicting him. Trump had previously been impeached on two Ukraine-related charges in 2019 before being acquitted in the GOP-led Senate.
On Nov. 22 of last year, Bernstein released a list of 21 Republican senators who “privately expressed their disdain” for Trump, which included both vocal critics — such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom voted in favor of convicting Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection — and senators more closely aligned with Trump, including Sens. Rick Scott and Tim Scott, both of whom denied Bernstein’s allegation.
Bernstein, who used anonymous sources while at the Washington Post to uncover Watergate, later said the list of GOP senators contemptuous of Trump was “much greater” than the 21 he named.
“We can get to the story I did about the 21 Republican senators, and the number is actually much greater than that, who really despise and disdain Donald Trump and have been so craven that they, except for a couple of them, they won’t say a peep,” Bernstein said in December. “And they have enabled, and [Sen. Mitch] McConnell, obviously, has enabled Trump’s most egregious excesses.”
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Despite attracting criticism from the more establishment wing of the party, Trump enjoys enduring popularity among the GOP base, many of whom still encourage the former president to seek the White House in 2024.
