Carl Bernstein Condemns Republican Party for Defending Trump’s ‘Evil’ Agenda: GOP Has ‘Become Hostage to an Undemocratic, Seditious President’
Famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein lashed out at the Republican Party as complicit in aiding and abetting former President Donald Trump in sedition and undermining “the very basis of our democracy.”
Appearing on Cuomo Prime Time after second day of Trump’s Senate trial for inciting insurrection, which featured chilling new video evidence, the former Washington Post journalist and author made clear he thought the 45th president’s misconduct far exceeded that of Richard Nixon’s.
“People always draw the comparison, Carl. Nixon, this is like Nixon,” host Chris Cuomo noted. “You were there. You are here. What’s the feel in contrast?”
“This is unprecedented. This is a seditious president of the United States who has undermined the very basis of our democracy, who does not care about loss of life,” Bernstein said, before invoking the word “evil” three times in describing Trump. “It’s the same president who is negligent in homicidal terms because of his handling of the Covid situation and not handling that in a way that would save American lives. But let’s talk about one other thing. Did this event we witnessed today in these horrible videos is about the presence of evil. And the evil here is an evil president of the United States.”
“I’ve covered the courts. You’re a lawyer. And in cases of violence, juries take into consideration in their minds, the presence of evil. And that’s really part of what the Republican Party here seems to refuse to consider, that evil has come to be the agenda of a president, and they have gone along with it.”
Many GOP Senators reacted in shock to what they described as the “riveting” and “horrific” video introduced at the Senate trial on Wednesday, but there was no signal that the compelling evidence of Trump’s role in fueling the violence swayed any Republicans to change their mind against conviction.
“Some of those senators, they’re not all just witnesses, which you didn’t have in Nixon,” Cuomo pointed out. “They’re many of them potential victims. And some you could argue are accomplices. What does that mean?”
Bernstein agreed, noting that several senators, among them, Sen. Josh Hawley (MO) and Sen. Ted Cruz (TX), had repeatedly pushed the same election fraud conspiracy messaging as Trump.
“What we know is that this Republican Party is thrall to the evil of Donald Trump, including undermining the very basis of our democracy, the electoral system,” Bernstein concluded. “They have aped his words for months about a rigged election. They allowed this terrible undermining of the process to go forward up to the point of the day on January 6th some of them were still talking about that we needed to see if there was some kind of rigged election here. This is unprecedented. A party — one of our political parties has become hostage to an undemocratic, seditious president of the United States and the evil that he has wrought.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
