Reporter Carl Bernstein, one of the two reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, named 21 Republican senators who he says have “repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for [Donald] Trump and his fitness” for office.
Multiple political reporters and pundits have reported that Republicans in Congress have privately expressed their distaste for President Trump, but Bernstein took it a step further tweeting the names of the 21 senators, saying the information came from “colleagues, staff members, lobbyists [and] White House aides.”
The names include Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Roy Blunt (Missouri), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (South Dakota), Mitt Romney (Utah), Mike Braun and Todd Young (Indiana), Tim Scott (South Carolina), Rick Scott and Marco Rubio (Florida), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Martha McSally (Arizona), Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts (Kansas) and Richard Shelby (Alabama).
Four of the senators, Sasse, Cornyn, Collins,
and Murkowski, have all criticized Trump publicly and three others, Romney, Rubio, Murkowski, and Toomey have all publicly congratulated President-elect Joe Biden for his election victory.“Many, if not most, of these individuals, from what I have been told, were happy to see Donald Trump defeated in this election as long as the Senate could be controlled by the Republicans,” Bernstein told CNN Friday.
Many of the senators named in the story have remained quiet, but a spokesman for Florida Senator Rick Scott called the list in a tweet “dumb and doesn’t warrant a response.”
Bernstein along with Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, which led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The Guardian notes Woodward, who has covered Trump, wrote two books on outgoing President Trump, Fear and Rage.
Trump’s desperate attempts at holding the White House is on its last legs. On Monday, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court rejected the Trump campaign’s effort to block the counting of certain absentee ballots clearing the way for those ballots to be counted in multiple counties, including Philadelphia.