It’s Bob Woodward, so it must be another Watergate scandal, right? That’s the thinking on CBS This Morning on Thursday as Gayle King and John Dickerson compared the leaked quotes in the latest Woodward tome Rage to the 1970s scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. Gayle King also falsely touted the claim that Donald Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax.”
Talking to Dickerson, King cited the newscasts she stayed up late watching: “I was watching the news last night, I stayed up very late watching all the coverage…. It's being compared to the Watergate tapes and to a smoking gun. Do you think it rises to that level?” (One can probably assume that Democratic donor King was watching MSNBC or CNN.)
Regarding Trump telling Woodward he was downplaying the COVID outbreak to avoid a panic, Dickerson chided, “This isn't just one bad decision in the heat of the moment. This is a protracted choice over a long period of time while the stakes were as high as they could possibly be to not inform the public in the way it needed to be informed.”
He then lamented that, unlike Watergate, no one is trying to impeach Trump (again):
What's different now, though, than during Watergate is that we don't think about things in the abstract. We are in a condition, and we're in the middle of a presidential campaign where everybody is off on their -- to their sides and there as we've seen again and again been very little interest on the President's side to say anything that's critical of him, particularly now when it's a presidential race, where the stakes are high. There's not that pressure on the president that Richard Nixon had when a lot of Republicans came to him and said, “You’ve got to resign.”
Dickerson loves this line of thought. On October 11, 2019, he reminisced about the differences between then and now: “During Nixon you had three networks. Some would say there was really only one network at the time.” Parroting what he said on Thursday, the journalist in 2019 mourned:
But you had a sort of common set of facts. Now everybody can go to their corners. You have social media which not only allows different information but allows a kind of tribal response to things. So that people just talk past each other and that destroys institutions.
We get it. You don’t like Americans not trusting journalists. But there’s a reason for that. On Thursday, King said of Trump and COVID: “He called it a hoax. He called it a hoax.” No he didn’t. On March 4, even the liberal Snopes.com conceded: “Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax.”
Dickerson thought about correcting the co-host, but gave up: “Well, he -- the hoax language is a little tricky. But what he certainly did was he said it was the Democrats who were raising it and the media.”
The CBS segment was sponsored by Liberty Mutual and Toyota. Clock on the links to let them know what you think.
A transcript of the segment is below.
CBS This Morning
9/10/2020
8:05 AM
GAYLE KING: CBS News senior political analyst and 60 Minutes correspondent, that's John Dickerson, joins us to discuss. John, this is the thing -- always good to see you, of course. There is the thing, you're the perfect person for this conversation. I think why the words are so hard because you hear in February where he knew how deadly it was, the President. Then you see that he's out on the campaign trail saying something very different, “nothing to see here, no big deal.” I keep thinking about people who died during that time and people who have lost loved ones. On the other hand, the President's supporters say, “Listen, he's supposed to be a cheerleader, which is what the president said he was doing. He doesn't want to cause panic. He wants to keep calm.” Do his supporters have a point about his strategy here?
JOHN DICKERSON: No. Gayle, there's a clear playbook when there's a public health crisis. If you read any of the manuals for leaders in a public health crisis, it says the most important thing is to be truthful to people. You have to tell them the truth because in this case, if you're not truthful to people, you send them out into the world, and they make the situation worse. They spread it. So to suggest that not sowing panic is a valuable leadership option when you've got a pandemic that spreads through contact is not possible. But secondly, and this is really important, because telling the truth here is crucial to public health. The President is mischaracterizing how he handled the virus in its early period. He was saying that talk of the virus and its virulence was a Democratic plot and something that the media was raising.
KING: He called it a hoax. He called it a hoax.
DICKERSON: Well, he -- the hoax language is a little tricky. But what he certainly did was he said it was the Democrats who were raising it and the media. The reason that's important is he is diminishing the warnings. So he's not just saying don't be fearful, but he's saying when you hear somebody saying this is something to be fearful about, you should be suspicious of them. That's that sows mistrust and distrust into future warnings about this as it goes forward. So it's much worse than not sowing panic, it's actively undermining the public health response.
KING: So what does it say about his leadership during times like this?
DICKERSON: Well, it says that in a crucial period, he did not follow what we would expect leaders to do, and specifically what we would expect leaders to do in a public health crisis. And again, telling the truth is so crucial because if you don't tell the truth at the beginning, not only do the cases snowball, but then people don't trust you when future decisions have to be made and they have to listen to you. Amanda Ripley wrote a book about disasters and what leaders do in a disaster. And the first thing that they all say is tell people the truth. Even if it's an unpleasant truth. Turns out people can handle it. When you tell them the truth, it binds them all together. So there's a playbook for this.
You tell them the truth, and that sets the conditions for all the other hard truths they're going to have to hear from you. And finally, why are people distrustful about vaccines right now? Because they've been fed a steady diet of mistruths, including yesterday from the white house podium in which the president's press secretary said he never downplayed it. Well, there are 32 cases of downplaying it from the Washington Post's count, and the president himself admitted it. So the ongoing lack of trust creates a bad situation, not in the past but in this very moment.
KING: There certainly is a lot of chatter about it, John. I was watching the news last night, I stayed up very late watching all the coverage. One -- it's being compared to the Watergate tapes and to a smoking gun. Do you think it rises to that level?
DICKERSON: Well, as an abstract matter of presidential leadership, and why does this matter, the president's key job is keeping everybody safe. This isn't just one bad decision in the heat of the moment. This is a protracted choice over a long period of time while the stakes were as high as they could possibly be to not inform the public in the way it needed to be informed. So it's -- this is about as big a decision as possible.
What's different now, though, than during Watergate is that we don't think about things in the abstract. We are in a condition, and we're in the middle of a presidential campaign where everybody is off on their -- to their sides and there as we've seen again and again been very little interest on the President's side to say anything that's critical of him, particularly now when it's a presidential race, where the stakes are high. There's not that pressure on the president that Richard Nixon had when a lot of Republicans came to him and said, “You’ve got to resign.”
