For DU'ers old enough to remember 'compare & contrast' Trump with Nixon

[crazytown]

Not a traitor I guess. Trump is a dumb Nixon on steroids?

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Nixon didn't try to destroy the US.

[Tom Rinaldo]

2. Trump is much worse

The only thing worse about Nixon was that he got to pursue a full blown war in Vietnam. But it's still early for Trump, he has time to catch up. Nixon's wasn't as openly fascist as Trump. Supposedly in 1960 he decided to ignore credible allegations that the vote in Illinois went against him due to vote rigging in Chicago, because he thought it would be too stressful on the nation to attempt to upend JFK's victory.

[Hortensis]

3. Some character flaws in common -- notably to very different degrees,

otherwise little comparison in performance. That latter is probably due to very different circumstances, though. Our wealthiest millionaire classes had not yet turned into centimillionanire and billionaire classes, the Republican Party had not been totally corrupted and taken over, and right-wing voters had not replaced the Soviet Union with Democratics as the enemy they must destroy.

Remembering his paranoia and extreme ruthlessness and dishonor, I don't really doubt that Nixon would have destroyed our democracy to keep and grow power if he could. Democracy has always been the enemy of hard-core right wing ambitions.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

4. Trump is much worse...

Nixon was a troubled President but I didn’t fear the loss of our country to an enemy. May have not been loved across the world but didn’t make us a laughingstock worldwide.

Trump is a psychoboulevard (he’s way bigger than a mere path) set on destroying all that we hold close to our hearts in this country. He takes delight in seeing violence and suffering.

[Arkansas Granny]

12. I have to agree with everything you've said. Nixon might have been a crook, but he knew the

Constitution and he knew how government was supposed to work and I never felt that he was trying to cause the downfall of our country. He also had a lifetime of public service to his credit.

Trump, on the other hand, knows nothing about government or the Constitution and the idea of public service is not a concept that he understands. He is only concerned with being the focus of the attention and power that goes along with the office of the Presidency and the fortune he can make personally from being in that position. He revels in the chaos and suffering that he is causing.

[Greybnk48]

5. Nixon was an intelligent Statesman

and, oddly, a very pro-environment President. Under Nixon we passed Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Drinking Water Act, Earth Day, to name a few.

I couldn't stand the man, probably because I still thought in black and white and I loved JFK so, I could never like Nixon. Also, he was an absolute stiff publicly.

Comparing Trump to Nixon doesn't compute for me. Trump is like nothing before in my lifetime. Maybe he is more like Harding. A drunken, uneducated, ignorant buffoon who had no idea what he was doing.

[PJMcK]

7. Completely agree

See my post #6.

Enjoy your day, Grey.

[PJMcK]

6. Nixon was a complicated president

I hated him. I became politically aware during his presidency and the experience made me a life-long Democrat.

However, Nixon was a product of the American political system. He went to Duke for his law degree. He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War II. He was a member of Congress and then the Senate. He served as Vice President and eventually was elected President. He served our country.

Trump has never done anything like that.

There is no doubt that Nixon was a criminal. And yet he did some remarkably important things. He brought an end to the Viet Nam War and brought the American POWs home, subsequently ending the military draft. In 1972, his overtures to China eventually led to diplomatic relations between the two nations. His administration initiated détente and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. He enforced desegregation of Southern schools. He created the Environmental Protection Agency.

Trump will never doing anything like those accomplishments. He's incapable of the sustained thought that great accomplishments require.

To be clear, I hated Nixon. Yet one cannot deny real accomplishments and when comparing these two Republican presidents, Trump isn't even in the same universe.

[NewJeffCT]

10. Excellent post

I was too young to remember much of Nixon - I remember coming home from elementary school and being upset that Watergate hearings were on instead of my afternoon cartoons.

However, you are correct that, despite the paranoia and criminal conduct, Nixon did have some real and lasting accomplishments.

[PJMcK]

13. Thanks

In 1976, I was 18 and got to vote for the first time. I don't think I've ever missed a vote since. I thank Nixon for that because I hated him so much!

Trump will never have any positive accomplishments since he's motivated by the lowest impulses.

It's amazing to me that I can have any positive thoughts about Nixon! Thanks, Trump.

[Vinca]

23. And, believe it or not, he also had a heart. Years after he left office he appeared in southern

Vermont at a small, local hospital to visit the dying former GOP Senator George Aiken. He didn't make a big deal out of it. It wasn't a photo op. It was a normal, decent thing to do. Trump wouldn't show up to comfort his dying relative.

[uponit7771]

20. Didn't know those things about Nixon,

[Va Lefty]

28. Much of what you say is true, however

Nixon could have had the same deal he got in '72 in '69. The Country was ready to end the war then. In fact, Nixon had campaigned on ending the war. Every American who was killed, maimed or imprisoned after '69, is on Nixon.

[PJMcK]

37. Right you are

My point is simply that Nixon understood how our government works and used its levers to accomplish things. Trump is an anarchist. His "accomplishments" will not help our country.

[mtnsnake]

8. Both tried to stifle the media

and Trump is continuing with that effort.

[harumph]

9. Nixon was not stoking stochastic terrorism

Both men self serving - but Nixon (way smarter).

[spanone]

11. nixon was a petty thief / trump is a serial killer

[MiniMe]

14. Lets see, Nixon created the EPA

He also wanted to do health care for all. And that was real health care, not junk policies. He also cared about the Constitution

[beachbum bob]

15. trump is who he always have been. All for himself. Nixon never approached the levels of disgust

that trumps hits every day

[jalan48]

16. Trump is worse but reflects the different times we live in. The country is much further to the right

politically than it was in the early 70's.

[grantcart]

17. Trump is Nixon on Crack

[Hassin Bin Sober]

18. I guess people are forgetting Nixon conspired to spoil the peace talks for political gain.

When a Candidate Conspired With a Foreign Power to Win An Election

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461

Richard Nixon’s telephone calls came regularly during the 1968 campaign. And H.R. Haldeman took meticulous notes, jotting down the instructions he received from the candidate.

Sometimes Nixon needed to blow off steam: demanding that a reporter from The Washington Post or The New York Times be banned from his campaign airplane for writing an offending story. (“Times and Post off,” Haldeman recorded. “Times forever.”) One such call came at midnight, from Nixon’s co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue: Haldeman dutifully noted that the stirring score to the World War II documentary Victory at Sea, which Nixon so enjoyed, was playing on a phonograph in the background.


Other calls were steeped in intrigue. In one series of scribbles, Haldeman reported Henry Kissinger’s willingness to inform on his U.S. diplomatic colleagues, and keep Nixon updated on President Lyndon Johnson’s furious, eleventh-hour efforts to end the Vietnam War.

Haldeman, 42, was Nixon’s campaign chief of staff, a devoted political adjutant since the 1950s. In late October 1968, the two men connected on what came to be known as “the Chennault Affair.” Nixon gave Haldeman his orders: Find ways to sabotage Johnson’s plans to stage productive peace talks, so that a frustrated American electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope to end the war.

[Stargleamer]

26. No, I remembered that. . .

Hell, I remember reading about him red-baiting and sliming Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jerry Voorhis before that. Still, Trump is way, way worse.

[flotsam]

19. Trump IS Nixon

on bath salts....

[Goodmax]

21. Nixon was

cunning, clever, wily, devious, crafty, a two-faced liar with a managed "good" public persona and a private corrupt persona.

Trump is an amoral illiterate moronic fanatically narcissistic pathological liar megalomaniac demagogue bully racist rapist thug swindler wannabe dictator who's only read one book - the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler.

[Iterate]

22. Trump is a malformed sociopath. Nixon was not.

Nixon was a racist, but not racist enough for the 13.5% who voted for George Wallace in 1968. Trump has swallowed them up and amplified their hate. Nixon was a paranoid who, by his own admission, stoked an internal hatred that led to his crimes and downfall. Watch his David Frost interview; he was self-aware, even as he couldn't quite admit the whole truth to himself.

Trump has no self-awareness, only self-aggrandizement.

Maybe it's easiest to compare people of the times. Trump is dumber than Roman Hruska was, more bigoted than Jesse Helms, more mendacious and crooked than Agnew, more disruptive than Wallace. Somewhere in there is the cultist and manipulative part of Manson.

Nixon might not even stand out on today's current scene. He was awkward and irritating like Cruz, infuriating like Grassley, treacherous like McConnell, slippery like Ryan, stubborn and petulant like Hatch. But he wasn't a traitor, he wasn't a sociopath. He would never have gone to Pittsburgh.

[MyNameGoesHere]

24. Dear God the posts on this thread.

The mother fucker said “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” He is the cause of everything that is going on today. He is the architect of this sorry state of affairs. I don't give a fuck if he helped little old ladies cross the road, he deserves no respect and to rot in hell.

[shanny]

30. No shit.

Not a traitor? How about sabotaging the peace talks to improve his election chances? Tens of thousands of Americans died because of that, not to mention Vietnamese, Cambodians, etc. That wasn't the only foreign policy atrocity he was responsible for (see Chile, for example).

And many of the liberal policies he gets credit for were because of the Democratic Congress.

Fuck Nixon.

[GulfCoast66]

25. Thats not the important contrast.

The Republican Party then and now makes the most stark contrast. There were true patriots in that party then. Many serving had voted for the civil rights act 9 years earlier and they forced Nixon out.

Nothing but racist authoritarians and facist Christians now.

[MaryMagdaline]

27. Richard Nixon cared about American strength and prestige

He wanted the financial stability of the United States. He worked himself to death. He was intelligent. He was not kind or empathetic but I think he wanted poor people to do well do that our country would look good vis a vis communism. Even if he did things for all the wrong reasons, he did several good things. He served his country.

He was way above Reagan, Bush and Trump.

And ... he stole much less. A lucrative legal practice, a House in San Clemente, small stuff.

He was not on the payroll of a foreign country and did not launder money.

He was a crook during all of his campaigns and he was a war monger. He deliberately kept the Viet Nam war going and committed treason. He backed every brutal right wing government in the world.

He was not a joke to the rest of the world and no f’g way would he let NATO slide into nothingness.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

29. Nixon was a crook, and behind Watergate there were a lot of other nefarious financial transactions

that didn't get as much attention as the break-in and the tapes. There was also the Chennault matter, using Anna Chennault as an intermediary, which prevented negotiations for a peace treaty with Vietnam until after the 1968 election. I can't really think of anything nice to say about Nixon, except that he was fundamentally an institutionalist who tried to use and pervert government institutions, but not destroy them, to maintain political power. But Nixon probably believed he was doing the right thing for the country and that the ends justified the means. Trump, however, is a political nihilist. He doesn't give a rat's patoot about the established institutions and norms of the government, including the Constitution itself, but only wants to aggregate power to himself for the gratification of his black hole of an ego. Nixon had some boundaries; Trump has none.

[Lithos]

31. No, not that analogy

Trump is psychotic and narcissistic, Nixon was just paranoid.

L-

[NoPasaran]

32. Nixon: a better class of criminal

[TygrBright]

33. Oh, gawd, no... Nixon was drunk, mean, and paranoid.

He was power-crazy and egotistical.

But... oddly enough, he was NOT amoral. He was a Quaker by upbringing.

Foul-mouthed, racist, sexist, etc. but a product of his gender, race, and era.

But he was patriotic. He wanted America to be a major player in the world.

He succeeded in finalizing the end of the Sino-Soviet alliance and peeled China out from under Soviet influence once and for all.

He would NEVER have sold us to Russia.

He cared about the continued existence of America.

He created the EPA.

He was also a realistic capitalist. He understood that to survive, capitalism had to be regulated from its worst excesses. He was a publicly avowed Keynesian.

He created OSHA to monitor workplace health and safety and enforce wage and hour laws.

He took us out of Bretton Woods and uncoupled the dollar from gold reserves.

Many of his ideas and actions were damaging and reactionary, but they always had some level of theory and policy research and justifications that went beyond single-business, single-industry or even single-sector effects in consideration.

He was a miserable asshole who did incalculable damage, but it was not the kind of heedless, bull-in-a-whole-arcade-of-china-shops damage that [Redacted] is so gleefully perpetrating.

I am NOT a Nixon apologist.

But given the choice between him and [Redacted,] I'd hold my nose and take tricky Dick any day.

disgustedly,
Bright

[smirkymonkey]

36. +1

[Raine]

34. I remember at the time many people saying that

no matter what Americans could sleep without fear of being blown to bits while they slept. No matter what Nixon could be trusted with the nuclear codes. : Then we have Trump and there's the difference.

[leftyladyfrommo]

35. Nixon didn't wear awful black suits

with a way too long red tie.

Hid I hate that suit and tie.