Veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward said Republican leaders privately concede President Trump is not fit for office.
The Watergate sleuth appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday, the day after the first general election debate of the 2020 cycle and 34 days until the election, and said Trump is “assassinating the presidency.”
Woodward went on to critique the Republican Party as an “institution that’s not an institution,” and he referred to the Watergate scandal in which a trio of influential Republicans — 1964 presidential nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes — went to the White House in 1974 to tell President Richard Nixon he did not have the support in Congress to survive impeachment, after which he resigned.
“Are we in a world where there are leaders in the Republican Party? I know some of them privately, very, you know, kind of in the deep whisper, ‘Oh, yeah, we know he’s not the man for the job.’ Are they going to organize? Are they going to see what’s before them?” he said.
This echoes what Woodward wrote at the end of his new book, Rage, after 18 interviews with the president, that “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
Carl Bernstein, who exposed the Watergate scandal in the 1970s with Woodward while at the Washington Post, has said on CNN that Republicans are privately questioning Trump’s sanity and even called on GOP leaders in Congress to abandon Trump and force him to abdicate his powers as president in a Nixon-era move.
Woodward said on Wednesday the kind of leadership needed for such a feat is “rare” and requires some introspection in which people in these roles ask themselves what is in the national interest.
“We can’t just play politics as normal, because this is not a normal moment, and as everyone’s pointed out — what’s the election going to be like? How are votes going to be counted? What is going to be certification? What is the role of the courts? God help us,” he concluded.
