Presidential historian Tim Naftali — who directed the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum from 2007 to 2011 — delivered a stark warning about President Donald Trump in the wake of the president’s unconstitutional ban on certain news media organizations that Trump has branded “fake news.”

Appearing Saturday morning on CNN with anchor Kasie Hunt, Naftali reacted after watching a 2020 exchange between Trump and CBS “60 Minutes” anchor Leslie Stahl, in which the president did not deny labeling news coverage “fake” in order to undermine reporting on him.

“The media is fake, and frankly, if I didn’t have social media, I’d have no way of getting out my voice,” Trump told Stahl in the clip.

Stahl recounted a past private conversation directly to the president: “Do you know what you told me a long time ago? When I asked why you keep saying ‘fake media?’ Yeah, you said to me, ‘I say that because I need to discredit you so that when you say negative things about me, no one will believe you.’”

Trump again did not deny the account. “I don’t have to discredit you,” he said.

“But that’s what you told me,” Stahl insisted.

“You discredited yourself,” Trump replied.

“Tim, that speaks volumes about the president’s thinking,” Hunt said after the video aired.

“Listen to the president,” Naftali urged, “because the president reveals almost everything about how he understands the freedom of speech. He has revealed a lot in his comments recently. He’s made it clear that he believes that he alone, not the Republican Party, not the executive branch writ large, but he alone can determine what’s truthful and that the American people shouldn’t hear.”

“That is beyond narcissistic,” Naftali said, blasting the president for daring to try to break First Amendment guardrails for the press. Even Richard Nixon — who despised the press — never went so far, he said. The guardrails he invoked are those of the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, which bars the government from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

“Richard Nixon is his own tragic and troubled story. But one thing about Richard Nixon was that Nixon believed in the constitutional institutions of this country,” Naftali said. “When push came to shove in the summer of 1974, and the Supreme Court said, Mr. President, you’re going to have to turn over the tapes as part of our legal system, the president thought about it. He wasn’t happy at all, and he knew this meant the end of his presidency. But in the end, what did he do? He gave the tapes, as demanded by the Supreme Court.” The episode Naftali described was United States v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on July 24, 1974, that the president had to hand over the White House tapes; Nixon resigned weeks later, on August 9, 1974.

“So Nixon understood there were actual red lines,” Naftali argued. “One of the reasons why he was so secretive was that he knew he was acting wrong. He had a sense of shame. He knew his enemies list was wrong. He knew you shouldn’t use the against journalists or anyone else. He knew that was wrong. He tried to do it secretly. He tried to go around.” The enemies list Naftali referenced became public during the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, and the effort to turn the IRS on political opponents was later cited in the abuse-of-power article approved by the House Judiciary Committee in July 1974.

“We have a president now who doesn’t seem to know right from wrong when it comes to our Constitution,” Naftali concluded. “He speaks as if he doesn’t believe in the basic concepts that Richard Nixon understood were the American constitutional way.”

For readers following the dispute over press access, the historian’s comparison is the frame: a president who, in Naftali’s telling, accepted judicial red lines versus one who, in his view, does not — with the president’s own words to Stahl sitting at the center of the exchange.

Alternet has separately documented the news ban. This article is based on Alternet’s original report.