Stop Saying Trump is Like Nixon
Whether you consider Trump’s character, campaign, policy, or potential downfall, he’s not comparable to Nixon.
Richard Milhous Nixon, that wonky old crook, still rears his head these days. Any time a politician shows a fear of the media, or masks the truth, or plays dirty tricks on an opponent, some journalist will hop on Twitter and refer to them as “Nixonian.” And now Donald Trump, a man who has always despised negative press covfefe and (allegedly) did something that looks a heck of a lot like obstruction of justice, is our president. He’s a Republican with a history of pandering to (or at least not quite distancing himself from) racists, a man who thinks he’s above the law. Of course people are comparing the two.
But I want you to know that Trump is really, really not like Nixon. Stop saying it. Don’t insult Nixon that way.
Let me add some context: I’m what historians call a “Nixonphile.” I’ve read several books, hundreds of articles, and hours of Watergate tape transcripts because I am fascinated by the 37th president. I have yet to meet someone who has as much interest in him as I do. A friend of mine got me Nixon laptop stickers for Christmas, and my girlfriend’s mom got me a Nixon bobblehead (I use them both). So I guess my interest in him has left a mark on people.
Please be aware that I do not like Richard Nixon — he was, at least from 1972 to 1974, a corrupt politician and a deluded soul. I can’t forget that he obstructed justice because he thought it would be best for the country. But I do consider him a unique and singularly important figure in the history of the world after 1945, and I think the mistakes he made within two years of his half-century of public life have come to unfairly define who he was. Simply put, Nixon is only comparable to President Trump in the slightest ways. Drawing wholesale parallels between them is cheap and reductive, and while it’s worth wondering why we’re so quick to do so, we need to first set the record straight. Nixon and Trump have vastly different characters, campaigns, and policies; moreover, Trump’s downfall, if he has one, will likely not look like Nixon’s. Let’s go one by one to discover why the comparisons don’t work.
Character
Years from now, when we’re all pushing daisies, historians will look closely at the Trump psychosis. When they do, they’re going to see a hedge fund child who grew up always getting what he wanted and never learning to take no for an answer. Trump has a self-absorption problem that probably started when he was a little boy and has grown ever since. Honestly, how does anyone with any read on the outside world say that they started off with “a small loan of $1 million?” And let’s not forget what one might charitably describe as his “way with women.” But it all makes sense, because he’s 70 years old and he’s never been anything but rich and pampered.
Nixon had a different upbringing. His devout Quaker parents lost their Illinois farm when he was 9 years old and started a small gas station in Southern California, at which Richard worked from a young age to help keep business going. As a teenager, he lost a little brother named Arthur to pneumonia. Thanks to his smarts and work ethic, Richard earned a college scholarship offer from Harvard, but his family needed him to keep working at the station, so the future president attended nearby Whittier College before eventually earning a substantial scholarship to Duke Law School (he couldn’t have afforded it otherwise). He later spent three years in the South Pacific during World War II, ascending to the rank of Commander. Amid all this he carefully courted a high school teacher named Patricia Ryan after becoming smitten by her at a community theater production they both signed up for. Dick and Pat were happily married for 53 years, and no rumor ever arose about major disputes or unfaithfulness between them. He only made it 9 months after she passed away from cancer in 1993. I mean, really, look at this man. Would Trump muster up that much emotion for all of his wives combined?
The difference between the two men could not be greater in this respect: Trump is entitled — he made billions, sure, but with a lot of help and privilege along the way. That wasn’t who Nixon was at the beginning, and it wasn’t who he was for the vast majority of his political career, either.
Campaign
We all recall Trump’s political star rising as he rode down an escalator. He famously said that Mexico didn’t “send their best” across the border, as if there was some sort of Jedi council in Ciudad Juárez deciding who would risk their lives at the border fence and who wouldn’t. From that day forward, he carefully toed the line between overt racism and campaigning primarily to the angry white voters of Middle America. It worked for him the same way snarky reporters would tell you it worked for Nixon when, after two consecutive failed campaigns, he ran for president in 1968 on a “Southern Strategy.”
Nixon certainly knew what he was doing with his “law-and-order” rhetoric, just as Trump knew what he was doing with his own messaging, and many jumped on the similarities. But a closer look shows a great distinction between the candidates.
To understand this distinction, we should look even further back than 1968. Nixon, the ultra-qualified sitting Vice President, had fallen just short of the Oval Office in 1960 (in an election that was probably at least a little bit fixed for JFK). You may not have known that, earlier that fall, Nixon was a bad phone line away from securing the endorsement of none other than Martin Luther King. After Dr. King was arrested for staging a sit-in, Nixon’s advisers kept him from a working telephone at which he could reach his old friend. Apparently it wasn’t a good idea to alienate Southern whites by reminding them that Nixon and King had a friendly history. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s advisers practically forced him to call the civil rights activist’s wife and offer his sympathy. King was disappointed in Nixon, whom he had once considered a beacon of hope for the African-American community, and black leaders haven’t respected a Republican nominee since. The history of racial party alignment in this country may have been dramatically altered if Nixon had been able to make the call he wanted to make.
Needless to say, the issues minorities have taken with Trump’s racial policy were never from his failure to communicate. But even in 1968, after Democrats had worked diligently to abolish Jim Crow and segregation, Nixon attempted to bring them into his camp. Remember how Mike Pence came on the ticket so Trump could lock up the Religious Right? Nixon tried the same thing for African-Americans with Baltimore native Spiro Agnew. In his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Dick endorsed an initiative that would give African-Americans more opportunities to start their own businesses. He even embraced protesters at a rally and said that his election would be “a day of protest for the forgotten American.” None of these stories sound remotely close to anything we heard from Trump’s candidacy last year.
Is Nixon’s campaigning legacy marred by the fact that he subtly told white supremacists what they wanted to hear? Absolutely. But it’s also irresponsible to claim that Trump, who campaigned four decades later and on the heels of our first black president, was the natural heir to what Nixon was doing. It’s really quite amazing to say, given all the progress we should have made by now, but it’s true: 2016’s Republican nominee ran a campaign that was objectively more racist than the one 1968’s Republican nominee ran. And not by a small amount, either.
Policy
Inauguration Addresses set the tone for the policies a president will pursue. Nixon certainly could have mourned for America and painted a dark picture of it, with the backdrop of the violent, morally-decadent ’60s behind him, but he didn’t. Here’s what he said:
No people has ever been so close to the achievement of a just and abundant society, or so possessed of the will to achieve it. And because our strengths are so great, we can afford to appraise our weaknesses with candor and to approach them with hope.
Does this sound like “American carnage” to you? Didn’t think so.
We won’t spend much time on President Trump’s policy decisions thus far; instead, let’s quickly compare them to Nixon’s. While Trump effectively shut down the EPA, Nixon created it, and endorsed the Clean Air Act. Trump has helped set race relations back in time, but Nixon pushed harder (and more successfully) against segregation than any president ever, even trying his hand at an affirmative action initiative in 1970. Though Trump is in the process of putting millions out of health insurance, Nixon advocated for an employer mandate and expanded Medicaid for poor families with young children. Trump’s foreign policy has generated eyerolls from most of the developed world; Nixon created a partnership with Communist China that crippled the Soviet Union.
The American people see the difference: Nixon was so popular that he won 49 states in his 1972 re-election bid (nice going, Massachusetts), tied with Ronald Reagan for the most in history. Trump’s approval rating after five months is below 40 percent. Even if Sean Hannity gets another 10 million viewers watching his daily lamb and bull sacrifices to Trump, the president would be lucky to win 30 states in 2020. Indeed, Nixon’s policies were very much unlike Trump’s, and they had much better results. If he had been assassinated in January of 1973, Nixon would have gone down as one of the top 10 — perhaps even top 5 — chief executives this country has ever had. What went wrong?
Downfall
People forget how Watergate happened. Some of Nixon’s staff, whom he loved dearly, hired a team of “tough customers” to sneak into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. These wannabes were so incompetent in their little stealth operation that they caught everyone’s attention and implicated the White House in their breaking-and-entering crime. Most presidents would have simply taken the L and fired the staffers who commissioned the sting, but Nixon liked his guys too much. So he decided to fight and cover it up — and that’s what we call obstruction of justice. Then the national media, who had been grinding Nixon’s gears for a quarter-century, jumped all over the story and uncovered the unsavory truth. The rest, as they say, is history.
Long story short, Nixon was overconfident. He thought he could have his cake and eat it too — avoiding complicity in the Watergate scandal and keeping all of his staff intact. When an Oval Office tape came out that showed him agreeing to keep the press away from the story, however, Nixon knew his days were numbered. Lacking the votes in the Senate to survive impeachment, he resigned four days later.
The Watergate Scandal simply shouldn’t have been a big deal. It was some idiots, at the command of one of Nixon’s employees, bumbling their way into the Democrats’ headquarters to steal secrets from a party that was getting blown out anyway. Nixon should have just fired the person who told these guys to break in and that would have been the end of it. Maybe the administration has a bad news cycle in the summer of 1972 and Nixon wins 47 states instead of 49 — is that so bad? The public would have never called for his resignation had he fired the staffers.
Trump’s downfall, if it happens, will be a different story. Whether he somehow colluded with the Kremlin or molested some women or ran a multi-million dollar ponzi scheme as part of a “great deal,” it will most likely be his problem, not one someone on his staff made that he’s trying to cover up. If he ends up in trouble for the mistakes of Steve Bannon or Reince Priebus or Kellyanne Conway, we could consider Trump’s downfall to be Nixonian. Let’s hold off on the comparisons until then.
I don’t know why we want to put Trump (or Hillary, or anyone else) next to Richard Nixon. Perhaps we think of him as the archetype of political corruption, a sort of real-life Frank Underwood. Maybe some of us think he’s the worst American president we can remember, so we use him as an extreme example to shame current politicians. We might be too lazy to differentiate Nixon’s musk from anyone who just plain stinks.
But the eternal dichotomy of the Nixon years is that, despite everything, they were probably still a net positive for the country. He made people distrusting of the government in a way that punished many of his successors — 3 of the next 4 presidents served one term or less. Yet, during his time in the White House, we made great strides in race relations, transitioned ourselves out of the ’60s, and put a man on the moon. We also opened China, a move that marked the beginning of the end for the Soviets.
Nixon died in 1994 as a globally-respected American statesman, writing bestselling memoirs, traveling the world on behalf of the U.S. government, and even advising Bill Clinton on foreign policy decisions. That will never, ever happen for Trump, no matter how this thing ends. He simply doesn’t deserve a seat at the presidential table. Maybe that’s the most important reason you should stop saying Trump is like Nixon.
