Veteran investigative journalist Carl Bernstein delivered an unforgiving assessment of President Trump on Sunday, excoriating the commander in chief for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Watergate sleuth told CNN the president, whom he noted has exhibited “demonstrable instability,” is too self-absorbed to adequately handle the health crisis, and has cost American lives because of his unwillingness to “mobilize” enough testing that health officials have said is necessary to safely start reopening the country.
“We are not seeing a ‘stable genius,’ as the president likes to call himself,” Bernstein said. “We are seeing demonstrable instability, demonstrable inability to act like a responsible leader, to bring this country together. To bring together the best people he can, and some of that has been done, and then let them act. And also to mobilize the huge powers he has as president through the Defense Production Act. Through, for instance, calling up the National Guard and using the military to do the kind of testing that the experts like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have told us, we are behind. We are at a deficit. We are losing lives because this president has not mobilized to get the testing that we need.”
Trump has repeatedly berated individual reporters during the near-daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings. He reacted with umbrage to unflattering headlines last week after he floated the use of UV light or disinfectant injections to treat COVID-19 virus patients, which prompted a wave of warnings from disinfectant producers and public health officials. Trump later said his talk about disinfectants was “sarcastic.”
Before Bernstein was interviewed by CNN’s Ana Cabrera, Trump spent that last few hours griping about the media.
“The people that know me and know the history of our Country say that I am the hardest working President in history. I don’t know about that, but I am a hard worker and have probably gotten more done in the first 3 1/2 years than any President in history. The Fake News hates it!” he said in one tweet.
In another trio of tweets, Trump said the Nobel committee should demand their prizes back from reporters for their reporting on Russia collusion, and got roundly mocked for confusing Nobel Prizes, which are given out for academic, cultural, or scientific achievements, with Pulitzer Prizes, which are awards for journalism.
Bernstein, along with Bob Woodward, helped bring down President Richard Nixon with Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post.
Roughly 5.1 million people have been tested in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, which would be about 1.6% of the U.S. population. Health experts argue there needs to be more widespread testing, even as some states begin to reopen their economies at Trump’s urging and warn that protests against stay-at-home measures that are designed to be preventative could “backfire.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said the U.S. should double coronavirus testing before reopening the country, so health experts can get a clearer idea of the scope of the pandemic.
Cabrera asked Bernstein if friends and aides to the president have given him any indication that the death toll is weighing on Trump. Around 55,000 people who contracted the coronavirus have died in the U.S. as of late Sunday afternoon.
“Yes, I think it is,” Bernstein said. “But his response to the death toll is to get angry at his enemies because I think there is some awareness he has of how slow he has been to act here. And the fact is that we are behind in fighting this.”
