Tag: Richard Nixon

Trump adopts Nixonian strategy, claims president is above the law

The following article by Judd Legum was posted on the ThinkProgress website December 4, 2017:

President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up after speaking to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been indicted. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and one of his closest confidants, has flipped and is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Trump himself sent out a tweet over the weekend that, according to legal experts, makes the case against him for obstruction of justice.

This morning, in a seemingly coordinated effort, Trump embraced the idea that he did not obstruct justice because the “President cannot obstruct justice.” Continue reading “Trump adopts Nixonian strategy, claims president is above the law”

Trump is considering presidential pardons. Ford never recovered from the one he gave Nixon.

The following article by Kayla Epstein was posted on the Washington Post website July 22, 2017:

President Gerald Ford had barely been in office for a month when he made the most consequential decision of his short presidency: To pardon Richard M. Nixon.

It was an act from which Ford never recovered — and newly relevant as recent revelations about President Trump have renewed interest in the presidential pardon.

Ford, Nixon’s vice president, assumed the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, soon after Nixon resigned in disgrace over Watergate. But the weight of the scandal remained a burden on the White House — and the country. Continue reading “Trump is considering presidential pardons. Ford never recovered from the one he gave Nixon.”

s Tuesday night firing of Comey: ‘Nixonian’ or uniquely Trumpian?

The following article by Marc Fisher and Karen DeYoung was posted on the Washington Post website May 9, 2017:

It wasn’t quite evening, nor was it Saturday, but within minutes after President Trump fired the FBI director who was investigating Russian meddling in the president’s election last year, the words “Saturday Night Massacre” swept across a stunned capital.

In Washington, especially in the throes of scandals and investigations, each new shock development sparks a search for useful historical analogies. Immediately on Tuesday evening, Democrats and Republicans alike turned to 1973, to the Saturday Night Massacre, when President Richard M. Nixon rattled the nation by firing Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate his behavior in the Watergate scandal. On one evening that October, Nixon abolished the office of the special prosecutor, and both the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned after refusing Nixon’s demand that they fire Cox. Continue reading “s Tuesday night firing of Comey: ‘Nixonian’ or uniquely Trumpian?”

Trump And Russia: Is It Watergate Yet?

The following article by Joe Conason was posted on the National Memo website February 26, 2017:

As Donald Trump and his subordinates lash out wildly to suppress discussion of his presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with the Kremlin, they only fan intuitions of a truly monumental scandal. With their latest attempts to manipulate the Federal Bureau of Investigation and intimidate the Washington press corps, they are clumsily encouraging comparisons with Watergate — although as usual with this crew, it isn’t so simple to distinguish malevolence from incompetence.

The New York Times and CNN clearly struck a sensitive nerve with reports that the FBI is investigating multiple contacts last year between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. Whatever the nature of those contacts and officials, such stories fit neatly into the long-developing narrative of an illicit effort by Kremlin operatives to sway our presidential election on Trump’s behalf, through email hacking, fake news reports, hired internet trolls, and other means. Continue reading “Trump And Russia: Is It Watergate Yet?”

From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency

The following article by Rick Perlstein was posted on the National Memo website December 2, 2016:

shutterstock_364331684-668x501This January marks my 20th anniversary writing about the American right wing as a historian and a journalist. Wearing my historian’s hat, I’ve documented lunatic John Birch Society members convinced that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; underground militias stockpiling guns against imminent Communist invasion, threatening death to congressmen who dared abet the evil socialist agenda; drunken louts in a Queens, New York, bar describing Richard Nixon’s impeachment as a liberal coup, opining, “If I was Nixon, that’s what I’d do—I’d shoot every one of them.” I stroked my chin, and explained how such maniacal, anti-democratic, and violently anarchic rage had always been part of the story, though really only at the margins of the American conservative movement.

At the same time, as a citizen and as a journalist, I documented that margin encroaching on the center, until, with Donald Trump’s apotheosis, it seems now to have consumed the entire damned thing.

Let’s look at the score. Continue reading “From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency”