President-elect Donald Trump does not deal with facts or truth as much as emotions and "lying" — and he trumps even impeached President Richard Nixon on the latter — famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said Sunday.
"Trump lives and thrives in a fact-free environment," Bernstein told CNN's "Reliable Sources."
"No president including Richard Nixon has been so ignorant of fact and disdains fact in the way this president-elect does.
"And it has something to do with the growing sense of authoritarianism he and his presidency are projecting. The danger of it is obvious and he's trying to make the conduct of the press the issue, not his own conduct."
Bernstein used this week's Twitter war of words with Carrier Corp.'s union president Chuck Jones as an example.
"I would just take his bullying approach to the union leader, instead of going into the facts of what the Carrier deal was and what the unions in that institution have done," Bernstein told CNN. "Everything that he controverts, he doesn't go to a fact-based argument. He goes to an emotional argument.
"What we have seen throughout the campaign is pathological disdain for the truth. A kind of lie and ease with lying that we have not seen before."
Bernstein, said it was the media's job to hold the president-elect accountable.
"Look, our job is to find the context," Bernstein added
". . . We have time to find out the context and let's put it out there as our mission — the whole story: Fact, context, truth. If we stick on that, in the old-fashioned mainstream media, we're going to be fine.
"It's when we allow ourselves to be sidetracked by the theatrics as opposed to the substance, that's the problem. And we now have a president-elect who in terms of truthfulness — Richard Nixon was nothing in terms of lying compared to what we have seen everyone Donald Trump."
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