Trump sees democracy as ‘enemy territory’ says journalist who helped bring down Nixon

Bob Woodward has spent much of the last decade reporting on the former president

Longtime Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said he believes former President Donald Trump “looks at democracy as enemy territory” during an interview on MSNBC.

“The problem with Trump is, I think he looks at democracy as enemy territory, to be quite frank,” Mr Woodward told the network’s Ari Melber on Tuesday.

Mr Woodward knows a thing or two about scandal-plagued presidents. He and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate at the Washington Post helped end Richard Nixon’s presidency more than five decades ago.

More recently, Mr Woodward has reported extensively on Mr Trump. In 2018, Mr Woodward published a book called Fear: Trump in the White House on Mr Trump’s presidency and has since published several more books about the former president.

The latest of those books — The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump — featured transcripts of Mr Woodward’s 20 interviews with Mr Trump. The former president sued over the release of the tapes of the interviews, even though Mr Woodward’s publisher Simon & Schuster has maintained that the tapes were all on the record.

Now, with Mr Trump establishing himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president for a third consecutive election, a number of Americans are fearful about what his potential return to the White House might mean for American democracy.

As he runs for president, Mr Trump is actively under investigation for his participation in efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. He’s also under federal indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the presidency and is under indictment in New York City for his alleged role in a hush money payment scheme as well.

Mr Woodward spoke to Melber for a special edition of Melber’s show The Beat, discussing not just Mr Trump’s lack of respect for democratic norms, but also his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

If Mr Trump does indeed advance to next year’s general election to face Mr Biden, it will be the first time two people who have already served as president have faced off in an election since Grover Cleveland defeated Benjamin Harrison all the way back in 1892. There hasn’t been a rematch for president at all since the second contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in 1956.