Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein dusted off his trademark trope, yet again, to smear President Donald Trump for yet another media-concocted scandal that he claimed was “far worse” than Watergate.
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If you feel like you’ve heard that something’s “worse than Watergate” before, well, it’s because you have.
By my count we’ve had about a dozen Trump-related stories that are “worse than Watergate” according to Carl Bernstein.
A stroll down memory lane, anyone??
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) January 5, 2021
Bernstein has been resting on his laurels since riding colleague Bob Woodward‘s coattails to Hollywood fame in the early 1970s with the anonymously sourced Deep State leak that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Bernstein left the Post in 1977, but he was quick to draw parallels to the latest leak to fall in the paper’s lap courtesy of a secretive recording of a private conversation: Trump’s recent phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Already, Bernstein has been mocked for making the same hyperbolic claim about the Russia-collusion hoax, Ukraine impeachment ordeal and other Trump attacks that proved to be of little historic consequence.
Most recently, Bernstein claimed Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic was “worse than Watergate.”
But he insisted that this time he really means it.
“It’s not déjà vu,” Bernstein told CNN on Sunday. “This is something far worse than occurred in Watergate. We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States.”
In the phone call with Raffensperger, Trump put pressure on Georgia officials to investigate voter fraud in his state.
After outlining multiple avenues that collectively called into question the validity of hundreds of thousands of stolen votes, Trump noted that resolving the matter should be relatively simple due to the narrow margin of Democrat Joe Biden’s contested victory in the state.
“All I want to do is this … I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump says on the call.
Bernstein claimed Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger was “the ultimate smoking gun,” even though the context of the lengthy, off-the-cuff discussion makes clear that Trump is referring to rooting out fraudulent votes.
“It is the tape of the evidence of what this president is willing to do to undermine the electoral system and illegally, improperly and immorally instigate a coup,” Bernstein claimed.
“In any other presidency, this tape would be enough to result in the impeachment of the president of the United States and really an immediate call by the members of Congress including of his own party that he resign immediately,” he added.
