Watergate Reporter Says Nixon’s Lies Were “Nothing” Compared To Trump’s

Carl Bernstein Says President-Elect Has “Pathological Disdain For The Truth”

Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate story that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, said Sunday that Tricky Dick’s lies were nothing compared to President-elect Donald Trump’s. 

“Trump lives and thrives in a fact-free environment,” Bernstein said on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “No president, including Richard Nixon, has been so ignorant of fact and disdained fact in the way this president-elect does, and 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 th press the issue, not his own conduct.” 

Asked for an example of Trump’s dishonesty, Berstein pointed to president-elect’s “bullying” of Carrier union head Chuck Jones. 

“Instead of going tin the facts of what the Carrier deal does, and what the unions in that institution have done, everything that he controverts, he doesn’t go to a fact-based argument, he goes to an emotional argument,” Bernstein said. “What we have seen throughout the campaign is pathological disdain for the truth, a kind of lying and ease with lying that we have not seen before. … Richard Nixon was nothing, in terms of lying, compared to what we have seen from Donald Trump.”