Longtime journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN on Friday that President Donald Trump’s testing positive for the coronavirus, which he announced early Friday morning, creates “a national security crisis” for the country.
“This is DEFCON 1 in terms of the health of the people in the United States, in terms of our political health, in terms of our stability,” Bernstein told Don Lemon following the announcement of Trump’s diagnosis, according to Mediaite.
He added that the president’s “recklessness” in downplaying the danger posed by the coronavirus “contributed” to the crisis.
“We are now in the midst of a national security crisis,” Bernstein said. “We have to be concerned about adversaries, particularly Russia, taking advantage of this situation for its own purposes. We have to think about possible cyber-manipulation of the markets. We’ve talked about the markets, it’s obviously going to have a huge effect. We don’t know the future of this election campaign, which depends on the president’s health. We don’t know what his health is going to be. It’s going to totally upend the election campaign. So every aspect of our national life, in terms of stability, is now affected in waves that we could never have envisioned a day ago. And I think we need to start from that perspective.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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