Trump is right: don’t compare him to Richard Nixon

Word from the White House is that Donald Trump is turning pink (or orangy pink) at the mere mention of Richard Nixon. It seems, at the very end of a presidency in which he got so many things monumentally wrong (“The virus […] will go away in April”), Donald Trump is at least right on at least one final point. People need to stop comparing him to the 37th president.

Nixon has become the go-to cliché when referencing any manner of political corruption. The suffix “-gate” remains the laziest way to name a scandal because it is so ignorant of the fact that Watergate was unique in scale and complexity to the Nixon years. Arguably, the only reasonable use of “-gate” is when it’s done ironically, to make a ridiculously trivial scandal sound ridiculously grand, such as “Sharpiegate” when Trump doctored maps to support his belief that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama in 2019.

The fault is that both “Nixon” and “Watergate” have become gestural. They are mental switches that bypass the thinking process. To quote them is to ignore the reality of Nixon’s crimes, as well as his not insignificant virtues.

One of the better reasons to be made for prosecuting Trump, at least in the form of an impeachment trial, is that it would finally dispel the assumption that all presidential bad behaviour can (and should) be erased by the subsequent president. There is nothing about the transition between Nixon and Ford that should inform the transition from Trump to Biden. Biden should be under no obligation to look the other way for the sake of the country. Nor should one assume that Gerald Ford would argue otherwise.

Back in 1974, Ford was working from a sample size of impeached presidents of exactly one. Nixon, it should be remembered, quit before he could face that ignominy and the only example was Andrew Johnson who had been impeached in 1868. The second impeachment came about after Bill Clinton lied about his sex life and incurred the wrath of puritan Republicans in 1998. Ford simply wasn’t dealing with a familiar situation when he pardoned Nixon in order to preserve “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored”. There would have been no assumption that a bad precedent was about to be set for future bad presidents. Besides, in Ford’s estimation, Nixon had already “paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.” The same cannot be said of Trump, whose term is coming to a natural end.

It is also grossly unfair on Nixon (unimpeached) to compare him with Trump (twice impeached). Nixon quit rather than put America through a prolonged and damaging process ending with a trial before the Senate (which Trump has already done once and apparently would do again). In this one point, it proves that in their political, moral, and cultural identity, the two men are so different.

Yet even in their similarities they exhibit profound contrast. They both shared some anxiety around class in that both felt themselves interlopers in a world dominated by real or imagined elites. Nixon, however, was a political heavyweight, who had come to understand the meaning of defeat as much as he had come to value his victories. Nixon’s famous line to reporters in 1962, after he lost to Pat Brown in the race to become California’s governor, is often quoted. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” sounds very Trumpian in the way he refers to himself in the third person, but that sense of victimhood was more tortured – his smile is also a grimace as he says it – than that of the current president who only really suffers from a sense of entitlement. Would Nixon ever refer to himself as “your favourite president”? And on Twitter? It is hard to imagine.

By the time he won the 1968 presidential election, Nixon had already served two terms as Eisenhower’s Vice President. He had also spent over a decade in a different kind of political arena and though his later Watergate-era violations were clearly criminal, they were criminal in a way that he believed others would find acceptable. Nixon’s crimes were grounded in a political reality where dirty tricks were commonplace. Lyndon Johnson had used the FBI to spy on Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. Howard Hunt, one of the key Watergate players and a former CIA agent, would claim in 1973 that he had been told to infiltrate the Goldwater campaign and it was implied it would be as a favour for Johnson. Nixon would also learn from J. Edgar Hoover that Johnson had bugged Nixon’s campaign and had reached the perhaps understandable conclusion that dirty tricks were normal political gamesmanship. “Goldwater put it in context”, he is heard saying in a 1972 tape recording. “He said: Well, for christsake, everybody bugs everybody else. We all know that.”

It is now believed that Hoover hadn’t been telling the truth – the FBI hadn’t bugged the Nixon campaign – but that matters less than Nixon believing that they had. Hoover was effectively telling (or Nixon was hearing) what Nixon wanted to believe: that Nixon’s unethical behaviour was justified given the behaviour of others. “We were bugged in ’68 on the plane and bugged in ’62, even running for Governor. God damnedest thing you ever saw,” he once said.

Nixon’s paranoia was borne, then, from this outsider psychology but also a decade which had seen a president assassinated and Cold War tensions reach their peak. Trump, on the other hand, is the product of the media age, where amplitude matters much more than aptitude. It is a culture perfectly suited to Trump, who remains the man grown out of the bully who was sent to a reform school in 1959. Trump’s recent insurrection might have been propelled by all manner of latent hostility among America’s extremist right wing, but its seed was the psychology of a man who simply could not cope with a reality that doesn’t conform to his every wish. If it wasn’t treason, it would be more correctly described as “tantrum”; a rich man’s fantasy about the very first thing he couldn’t buy (though he did try in over sixty lawsuits).

Nixon, for all his trickiness, was both a two-term President who won the popular vote both times (by only 500,000 votes over Hubert Humphry in 1968, but by a landslide of eighteen million over George McGovern in 1972) whose political demise tends to obscure his accomplishments, most obviously around China, but also environmental protections. Perhaps out of political expediency rather than deep conviction, he was the first president to recognise the importance of green policies.

Trump’s accomplishments, on the other hand, amount to three Supreme Court appointees who wisely refused to get drawn into rigging an election, and the development of a COVID-19 vaccine that would have been considered the bare minimum response to a global pandemic. His most lasting legacy would be his promise to avoid any more “stupid wars”, except he did finally find something worth fighting for, even if it was his own political survival.

Lastly, in terms of their cultural impact, there is no comparison. Nixon was a complicated character of both light and darkness. He once played the piano for Duke Ellington and was the President who first celebrated American popular music at the White House. Yet he continues to fascinate us because, to repeat Kissinger’s chilling description, “the essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness”. The worst portrayals of Nixon paint him as a buffoon or a monster; the best capture the nuance and, indeed, that loneliness of a man lost in his neuroses. Trump, on the other hand, has rarely exceeded the caricature, either in art or real life. One cannot imagine a future scenario where he sits down with some latter-day David Frost and says anything that we haven’t heard before. Whilst the politics and culture of the nation that spawned him remain fascinating, the man himself never changed. He is the first president who hasn’t appeared to have aged in the job or have been shaped by the office. That is something you could never say about Richard Nixon who would ultimately reflect on the game of politics in a way that appears to be beyond the departing president.

“I know that it can be very easy, under the intensive pressures of a campaign, for even well-intentioned people to fall into shady tactics —  to rationalise this on the grounds that what is at stake is of such importance to the Nation that the end justifies the means. […] The lesson is clear: America, in its political campaigns, must not again fall into the trap of letting the end, however great that end is, justify the means.”