In the wake of the decades-overdue indictment of Donald J. Trump there’s been a lot of talk about my previous favorite Republican criminal president, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The obvious comparison being that A: Both at one point were looking at possible jail time for their behavior, and B: Cases were/are being made that indictment and jailing would be a bad, banana republic look for the USA.
A month after Nixon resigned Gerald Ford, the epitome of your dull, institutional D.C., no-wake team player, pardoned Nixon to put an end to “our long national nightmare”. Never mind that vengeance-crazed twerps like myself and 70-80 million others were popping corn in anticipation of Dick’s televised trial. (Ford’s approval rating dropped 25% in one day as a result.)
There’s a line of thought that Nixon and Trump are comparable on the scale of malfeasance, criminality and their rot-from-within threat to democracy, and should be treated similarly. I don’t see it that way.
Without diminishing the illegal and barbaric bombing campaign Nixon ordered to deliver a “victory” in Vietnam — long, long past the point when it was obvious the North Vietnamese weren’t going to submit to anything we did — Nixon’s Watergate fiasco was very small beer compared to what Trump has engaged in. And by that I’ll let it go at, A: kowtowing to a homicidal dictator like Vladimir Putin in general, B: withholding duly-appropriated weapons to Ukraine in a mob-style shakedown to force them to invent a scandal around his election opponent and … oh yeah … C: inciting a riot to overthrow the government based on a lie about an election he plainly lost.
For all his deeply ingrained psychological failings and insecurities, Nixon was a familiar enough institutional actor. We’d seen his type before, going back to the likes of Warren G. Harding and other flagrant abusers of legal niceties. Additionally, Nixon, who was intelligent and disciplined enough to carry out the basics of the job did interact with Congress well enough to produce and handful of commendable legislation.
Not so with Trump … ever. As we’ve seen in shockingly explicit relief during his now eight year rampage through our consciousness, Trump has neither the interest or the ability to focus on legislation or anything that doesn’t primarily benefit him. Unlike Nixon and every other corrupt politician who achieved the grand stage, Trump was and is solely … a personality. A creation of pop culture, with no footing at all in serious “public service”, however you take that to mean.
As many have long said, Trump is a manifestation of a deeply anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something that has always existed, but never before at this scale or volume, thanks to the virulence of our media/social media entertainment culture. (The irony for me always being that where most think of entertainment as providing pleasure via laughter, escapist adventure or titillation, the entertainment culture that has produced Trump and the Trumpists infecting Congress, delivers instead regular, reliable doses of outrage and greivance. Good times! Bon appetit!)
The salient point here is that where it was possible to agree with Gerald Ford that enough was enough and it was time to move on, because Nixon was, well, just a standard-size politician who got a bit out over his skis, Trump is something more sinister and worrisome.
Unlike Nixon, Trump inspires a clearly violent cult of irrational partisans. Unlike Nixon, Trump still enjoys a near lockstep (public) support of fellow Republicans. (Never mind 90% are privately wishing he’d die and be gone tomorrow.) And unlike Nixon, Trump’s career-long strategy is to never concede defeat, while ignoring and disrespecting every process that tries to contain his criminality. And — this is important — unlike Nixon, Trump has already demonstrated the willingness and ability to summon mob violence to “defend” him.
Historian Jon Meacham was on TV again this morning making the point that part of any nation’s maturing process is recognizing when history doesn’t apply. That is to say recognizing unprecedented threat and responding in unprecedented ways.
The response to presidential criminality 50 years ago probably doesn’t meet the broader, louder, more violent demands of today’s conflict. So right now, that means dropping every appropriate legal hammer on a character who has shamelessly, unrepentantly abused the values of this country, no matter how much howling and mayhem he sets off.
No doubt something bad will happen … somewhere. But the country/culture will be far better off for facing up and defending its values, as opposed to begging off in the vain hope of ending this latest long, long national nightmare.
Don’t forget the most salient difference-when faced with impeachment, Nixon resigned…. Nixon was proud, and knew that his career was at an end.
Of course, Nixon’s impeachment was bipartisan, and it looked likely that he would be found guilty by the Senate. Sadly, there were few Republicans of principle who were willing to vote against Trump.
Yes, Nixon’s MENU bombings were horrific beyond question – dropping more pounds of ordinance to the neutral Buddhists of Laos than were dropped by all the Allies of WWII on all the Axis powers. And Congress was kept in the dark about it. More generally, the USA dropped 7 billion pounds of bombs during that war. All allies combined only dropped 2 billion in all of World War 2. To me, that isn’t an impeachment type offense. Its a hanging that is traditionally used for that sort of thing, but if I was the decider on such matters four horses and some rope would be more appropriate. Millions of folks dead. We gave weapons to the Khymer Rouge, and after losing the war – we supported the Rouge in the UN until the mid-90s.
I gotta say I prefer Chris Lambert to Brian. First off because Chris is “the one” (there can be only one) in the Highlander series. And secondly – imputing that Trump trying to avoid starting WWIII is somehow a *bad thing* is just like Bircher / JFKiller crazy. Russia is merely China’s proxy, just like Ukraine is ours. The uprising was NOT a natural thing- it had Obama’s hands all over it. (It pains me to say I voted for that douche twice and then Biden more recently. But I will stand by Trump’s sanity as opposed to Biden’s insanity.)
This isn’t just my view. Its the view of Jack Matlock- the US Ambassador to Russia when the USSR fell – he was both Reagan and Bush Sr.’s pick. Not a leftist. Seymour Hersch (sp) supports this view, as does Noam Chomsky. Sort of centrist and leftist, respectively. It turns out Donnie was right about the lamestream media, too. Check this out, from the far-left-ish Mint Press
https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-ignore-seymour-hersh-bombshell-report-of-us-destroying-nord-stream-ii/283677/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/coup-cia-foreign-agent-law-color-revolution-georgia/283992/
(We shouldn’t be so surprised. The USA is #1 in regime change operations, with about 81 of them attempted between 1945 and 2000. 82 if you count Dallas 63 – and you should. (wikipedia.org/wik/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change ) Anyway I checked the AP and Reuters- the Mint Press is telling the truth here. You would think the wry-wing would want to get in on this chance to show Obama to be a miserable sort of hawkish liar., with Biden cut from the same cloth. Biden campaigned on promises of doubling down on China’s NFU. Thats what got my vote. Sadly, he was lying through his teeth. We should be nice to the Chinamen. We owe them about 2 trillion space-bucks, largely due to out-of-control military spending and liberal excess (‘Bamacare, corporate tax write-offs) But largely our defense department. They destroyed the American economy, rendering it defenseless. Good job, idiots. Its why this exists:
https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/
( Christ almighty- the Reds are coming soon! )
You left out George Soros….