CNN went completely off the rails during Sunday’s “Reliable Sources,” as host/“ridiculous figure” Brian Stelter and his guests labeled President Donald Trump an authoritarian dictator with reckless abandon. After opening the program by calling Trump’s comments about the media “poison,” Stelter turned the floor over to CNN reporter Carl Bernstein who declared, “There's a history of what ‘enemy of the people,’ that phrase means as used by dictators and authoritarians including Stalin, including Hitler.” And he warned that Trump’s words are “masses in the brain that ought to concern” everyone.
But according to Bernstein, his comparison of Trump to Hitler and Stalin doesn’t mean that’s what he was doing. “And I'm not about to say anything comparing about Hitler and Trump, but it’s a demagogue's statement,” he ridiculously claimed.
That smear came after Bernstein argued that “Trump's attacks on the American press as ‘enemies of the American people’ are more treacherous than Richard Nixon's attacks on the press.” And he seemed to be infuriated that there was not a consensus among the public calling for Trump’s impeachment:
And we live in a time now when there is no civic consensus in this country, like there was at the time of Watergate, about acceptable presidential conduct. There was a consensus that Nixon had to leave office because he had breached that acceptable conduct. We have no such acceptable compact among Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals in this country today.
“So, Trump is out there on his own leading a demagogic attack on the institutions of free democracy including the press,” Bernstein said, continuing to decry the President of the United States. And there was no push back against the CNN reporter’s outlandish theatrics from the host. Stelter humored him, instead he asked, “Do you have a sense that it's working?” Bernstein responded by pontificating about how Trump was dividing the country.
“We are into terrible authoritarian tendencies that we are seeing in the new president of the United States we've never seen in an American president such open authoritarian moves and rhetoric,” Bernstein ranted, “This is a terrible time we're living in.”
Almost 30 minutes later, the raving Bernstein railed against the President and exclaimed that people needed to heed the words Trump used to talk about the press. Because according to him, they’re equivalent to harmful brain tumors:
In the case of Donald Trump, especially, words matter. His words are an MRI of his mind. And so far that MRI is showing all kinds of masses in the brain that ought to concern not just reporters but people all over this country because they are expressed in demagogic and frightening and treacherous words that have meaning in terms of threats to democracy.
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest seemed to of had enough of listening to Bernstein’s bluster. “I really think at this moment we should eliminate the adjectives and stick to the facts,” she said directly targeting Bernstein and Stelter, “What I'm saying is; right now we should pay attention to the language that we're using and stick to the facts and eliminate the opinion and eliminate the adjectives.”
She also noted that when people pull up the news on their phones they’ll “get a whole series of editorials that tend to be all anti-Trump.” Which, is something Stelter is guilty of turning his show into.