By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Bob Woodward crossed a line that reporters don’t usually dare to cross. He delivered a stinging rebuke of the subject of a book he has just written.

“Rage” chronicles Donald Trump’s deception — among other things — regarding the pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans. We hear from Trump’s own voice how he “downplayed” the pandemic so as to avoid “panic” among Americans. He undersold the threat even though he knew it would be a killer of many thousands of Americans.

Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter who, with Carl Bernstein, unraveled the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, couldn’t resist the temptation to offer a scathing indictment on Donald Trump at the very end of “Rage.”

“When his performance as president is taken in its entirety,” he intones, “I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

OK. I happen to agree with him. So do millions of other Americans. To be fair, millions of other Americans believe Trump is the greatest president in history. I believe those folks are tragically mistaken.

Do I condemn or condone what Woodward wrote at the end of his latest book. I will condone it, but with a caveat: He no longer can be assigned to work on any aspect of a future story on Donald Trump being reported by the Washington Post.

Woodward said he consulted with his wife, Elsa, who edited his work. He talked to other editors, book publishers, colleagues at the Post. They all agreed that he had to keep that ending in the book.

Woodward told the truth as I have known it all along about Donald John Trump.