This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the latest anti-Trump outburst from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein — and his worst hits list.
Sunday on CNN’s Reliable Sources, his main venting venue, he hyped up his prior attacks on former President Donald Trump, claiming that the Republican is a “war criminal.”
His over-the-top invective against Trump is nothing new, as a quick trip through the CNN archive shows. In 2017, he declared of Trump’s decision to remove the FBI director, “This is a potentially more dangerous situation than Watergate.” In 2020, he was repeating his Watergate comparison as he charged Trump allies had “now joined hands with a tyrant.” Last fall, he described Trump’s response to COVID as “homicidal negligence” before declaring “we are witnessing the Mad King in the final days of his reign.”
Our Liberal Media Scream partner Brent Baker, the vice president of the Media Research Center, drew up a list of Bernstein’s greatest anti-Trump hits:
- “I think this is a potentially more dangerous situation than Watergate, and we’re at a very dangerous moment. And that’s because we are looking at the possibility that the president of the United States and those around him during an election campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power to undermine the basis of our democracy: free elections.” — Reliable Sources, May 14, 2017.
- “Let’s look at what Watergate was because it was about a criminal president who acted as a tyrant. And what we have here now is the Senate of the United States, through the Republican leadership and membership, has now joined hands with a tyrant.” — CNN Newsroom, Jan. 31, 2020.
- “His response has been homicidal negligence. He has failed to protect the American people and rather to put his own interest of reelection and holding on to the office of the presidency in front of the health and well-being of the American people.” — CNN Newsroom, Oct. 3, 2020.
- “We are witnessing the Mad King in the final days of his reign, willing to scorch the Earth of his country and bring down the whole system to undermine our whole democracy, strip it of its legitimacy, poison the confidence of our people in our institutions and the constitution for Donald Trump’s own petulant, selfish, rabid ends.” — CNN New Day, Nov. 20, 2020.
- “I think we need to calmly step back and maybe look at Trump in a different context. He is America’s, our own American war criminal, of a kind we’ve never experienced before … In international law, there have been, quote, ‘crimes against humanity.’ 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.” — Reliable Sources, Sunday.
Baker explains our weekly pick: “Bernstein is a one-note musician, trying every week to ramp up his singularly focused anger to get some attention. With so much unhinged animus for Trump, it’s hard to imagine anyone considers his rants anything more than entertainment from a guy trying, but failing, to match Trump’s skill at creating a negative public image for his opponents through creative terminology.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE screams.
