Watergate journalist compares Trump to Confederate ‘secessionist’ Jefferson Davis: 'Seditious reality'

Veteran journalist/author Carl Bernstein, famous for his reporting on the Watergate scandal during the 1970s, has made no secret of the fact that he considers President Donald Trump much more dangerous than President Richard Nixon — and when Bernstein appeared on CNN on January 10, he unfavorably compared Trump to Confederate leader Jefferson Davis.

Bernstein's Trump/Davis comparison came four days after the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building by a violent mob of far-right extremists (including white nationalists) who were hoping to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral college victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The 76-year-old journalist stressed that he holds Trump responsible for that atrocity and believes that the president, who refused to accept the election results, committed an act of sedition.

"One way or another, the stain of what has happened is going to cling to Donald Trump's person and his movement forever in history," Bernstein told CNN's Fredricka Whitfield. "The important thing at this moment is to make sure that in his state of utter madness, that he is constrained — that he is put in a constitutional straight jacket, that he cannot do further damage to the interests of the United States and the safety and health and welfare of its people and its constitution."

Bernstein went on to say, "Donald Trump is the enemy of the constitutional republic that is the United States of America. That's the meaning of what happened in this insidious insurrection that was inspired and encouraged…. by the president of the United States at the very moment that the Congress was counting the ballots to elect the legitimate president of the United States. That's what occurred here. This is something that needs to be addressed in terms of its seditious reality."

Trump, according to Bernstein, is comparable to "the secessionist president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, because Trump has taken his movement and himself out of the equation of the legitimate governance of the United States of America."

"He is no longer part of the United States of America," Bernstein told Whitfield. "He has really seceded himself and his movement from who we are as a country. That's what the meaning of that attack is."

Whitfield asked Bernstein to elaborate on the Davis comparison, and he explained, "I use that comparison because what we are left with now, Trump's movement — those people who have followed him so blindly, the tragedy of them following him so blindly — they are now left in another country, a country which they believe is now apart from the rest of the United States, that really follows only Donald Trump. That's why I made this comparison to the Confederate States of America, which had seceded from the larger entity. Trump's movement is not going to magically disappear."