Carl Bernstein, one half of the legendary duo that broke the Watergate scandal, declared president-elect Donald Trump a bigger liar than Richard Nixon in a blistering attack during an interview on CNN.
“Trump lives and thrives in a fact-free environment. No president, including Richard Nixon, has been so ignorant of fact and disdains fact in the way that this president-elect does,” Bernstein said on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “It has something to do with the growing sense of authoritarianism that he and his presidency are projecting and the danger of it is obvious and he’s trying to make the conduct of the press an issue not his own conduct.”
Trump, often prone to stretching the truth, has made a series of factually incorrect assertions this weekend that have further increased worry about the aim of his presidency. In just one interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump discounted CIA reports that Russia interfered with the U.S. election, said “nobody really knows” the facts around climate change and said he didn’t need daily intelligence briefings because he’s “smart.”
Bernstein alleges the past months have shown that Trump has a “pathological disdain for the truth,” pointing to his recent attack on the president of the union that represents steelworkers at the Carrier Corporation.
“I would just take his bullying approach to the union leader instead of going into the facts of what the Carrier deal was and what the unions in that institution has done,” Bernstein told CNN. “Everything that he controverts, he doesn’t go to a fact-based argument he goes to an emotional argument.”
“What we have seen throughout the campaign is pathological disdain for the truth, a kind of lie and ease with lying that we have not seen before.”