Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” veteran reporter Carl Bernstein accused President Donald Trump of being a racist tyrant who is turning the Republican Party into the “old Southern segregationist Democratic Party.”

Bernstein said, “We have a tyrant president of the United States trying to act like the king to undermine the very electoral system, the most important element of our democracy by impeding the Postal Service and throwing grave doubt among Americans about the efficacy of the system through lies and subterfuge. It requires a Republican Party that has gone along with this undermining of our electoral process to come to the floor and help save our democratic process at this moment.”

He continued, “This president of the United States is using the post office, crippling it, to make sure that votes are not counted that might go against him and against his Republican allies. This is an unprecedented crisis. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

He added, “Unless Mitch McConnell, other important Republicans step up, this will be the shame of the Republican Party for generations. Let’s look at the Voting Rights act of 1965, which ended the horrible Democratic Party segregationist whole on a so-called poll tax throughout the south to keep African-Americans from voting. That was —The Voting Rights Act was passed because of great Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, not the party of segregation, not the party of exclusion. Today the Republican Party is returning to the old Southern segregationist Democratic Party by allowing this president of the United States — a racist president with a racist appeal — to do this, undermine our electoral system through racist discrimination using the postal service of Ben Franklin to do it.”

He concluded, “This is a national emergency. It’s a national emergency cause by a despotic president who’s unique in our history. We’ve never had a president of the United States who’s tried to undermine our most basic institutions. We’ve never had a president of the United States who is, in public, even admittedly trying to hijack an election by excluding people from voting.”

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