Former Secretary of State John Kerry said the country faces “a genuine constitutional crisis” following Bob Woodward’s reporting on President Donald Trump’s dysfunctional White House and the unnamed senior administration official’s op-ed assailing Trump in The New York Times on Wednesday.
“We have a presidency which is off the rails,” Kerry told Anderson Cooper on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.” “We have a President who is not capable of doing the job, who clearly has these temper tantrums, doesn’t know enough to be making many of the decisions he makes.”
In the Times op-ed, the unnamed senior Trump administration official attacked the President’s “amorality” and reckless decision-making and said he or she is part of a “resistance” working to thwart Trump’s worst impulses.
Woodward’s new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” which exploded onto the political scene Tuesday, paints a portrait of a chaotic, dysfunctional White House under Trump.
“We see the evidence of people stealing a presidential document off his desk,” Kerry said, referencing Woodward’s reporting. “We see a general, the secretary of defense, ordered to kill another leader — a leader of another country — who turns to everybody after the phone is hung up and says, ‘I’m not gonna do that. We’re not gonna do that.’ ”
Trump responded to the book Wednesday in the Oval Office and said, “The book is fiction.”
The President also lashed out on Wednesday and dismissed the op-ed as “really a disgrace” and “gutless” and assailed the author and the Times for publishing the anonymous opinion piece.
“This is unbelievable,” Kerry said, and said the constitutional “crisis” is heightened because Republican senators are defending, “not the Constitution, not the institution of the Senate — they’re defending party and the President, who simply doesn’t know what he’s doing.”