Listen to Carl Bernstein’s segment on New Day from Friday. First he talked about the Georgia secretary of state:

“He just said what every Republican member of the Senate of the United States should have been saying weeks ago. He did and said what a patriot would do and what our senators, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate, by and large, almost all of them have failed to do,” he said.

Then he told us what he really thinks.

“We are witnessing a mad king in the final days of his reign, willing to scorch the earth of his country and bring down the whole system to undermine our whole democracy, strip it of its legitimacy, poison the confidence of our people in the institutions and the Constitution for Donald Trump’s own petulant, selfish, rabid ends,” he said.

“We have a president of the United States for the first time in our history sabotaging this country. That’s where we are, and will these Republicans continue to allow it for another day, because every day it appears more and more that our system cannot handle, was not designed, neither our Constitution or our institutions to handle an abberant, mad king like Donald Trump.”

John Berman said yes, they would allow it. That the only senators we’ve even heard from is Mitt Romney and Ben Sasses, and nobody else.

And that was when Bernstein named names.

“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,” he said.

“Mr. McConnell knows what’s going on and finally I’m told in the last 24, 48 hours, I believe he and some others are attempting to find a way to somehow bring the country off the ledge that we are on because of the mad king and what he is doing while Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and others whisper these conspiracies in his ears.

“But we have a problem. Seventy percent, 80% of those people who call themselves Republicans now believe because of social media, because of Donald Trump, and his disinformation and his lying, they believe it’s been a rigged election and we’re going to have to live with the legacy of this sabotage by the president.”

Berman asked what that would look like.

“Well, first of all, it may be too little too late, because the confidence in our institutions that Trump was wanted in his sabotage of the country bringing us from a cold civil war to pouring the flames onto that cold civil war and igniting it, so we’re close to a real cultural civil war and perhaps violence because of his refusal to accept the will of the people in the election, because he has attempted and failed at a coup — imagine, a coup attempt by a president of the United States to undermine our electoral system.

“He announced before the election he was going to attempt this coup by voter suppression, by legitimizing the process, saying it was rigged against us and when the votes came in against him, he followed up on the attempt at a coup. So it might be a little late to talk us off the ledge in this country by some of these senators and I’m not sure if they’ll succeed and what it might look like, a few, and I don’t know this yet because I’m still trying to report exactly what’s going on, there has been resistance as we know in the intelligence community, in the defense community, to some of what Donald Trump has been trying to do or perhaps talking to the president that he cannot invade, use troops, attack Iran in some ways.

“People are fighting back within our institutions, but it’s not clear at all that these senators will succeed, because can the system actually handle a Donald Trump?”