The following article by Kenneth T. Walsh was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website Deember 15, 2017:
President Donald Trump is behaving like the disgraced ex-president.
The comparisons between Donald Trump and the disgraced Richard Nixon are getting more salient, and a big reason is that Trump is behaving like Nixon did in fundamental and troubling ways.
Echoing President Nixon’s arguments in the early and mid-1970s, Trump says many of the nation’s leaders and institutions, including prominent Democrats, some establishment Republicans, and major news organizations, are biased against him and are attempting to orchestrate his downfall. This is the same approach that Nixon took, seeing enemies everywhere and creating a fortress mentality at the White House. A lengthy New York Times story last weekend showed the depth of Trump’s preoccupation with what his adversaries say about him and with how he can get back at them using Twitter, his favorite weapon, and the overall power of the presidential bully pulpit. “For other presidents,” the Times reported, “every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Mr. Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation.”
“No president has loomed as large over Donald Trump as Richard Nixon,” Princeton historian Julian Zelizer writes in The Atlantic. “Since he launched his campaign, when Trump appealed to his own Silent Majority through calls for law and order along the borders and in the cities, the comparisons have never stopped. As the congressional and Justice Department investigations into the Trump campaign and the administration’s dealings with Russia have unfolded, the comparisons with Watergate have been front and center… But now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is entering a new and more intense phase, as the prosecutor and his team seem to be circling closer to the president himself, one thing is clear – President Trump is drawing directly from Richard Nixon’s playbook as he mounts a three-pronged strategy to fight the investigation.” This involves Trump using the bully pulpit, as Nixon did, to undermine his critics including the news media, the FBI, congressional Democrats, and special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump is making appeals above all to his conservative base such as working class whites who feel left behind and business interests who want tax cuts and deregulation.
Zelizer points out that Trump claims the president, legally speaking, “can’t actually obstruct justice, an argument that emanated from the White House” under Nixon. This argument, in fact, was made by Nixon in an television interview with David Frost in 1977. Nixon said, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” This in turn stems from the finding of Nixon’s Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded that a president couldn’t be indicted or criminally prosecuted. Zelizer adds: “President Trump is trying to claim the same kind of complete, unaccountable presidential power, and will depend on this claim in the coming months as he faces heightened scrutiny.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has spent considerable time with Trump despite tangling with him on a variety of issues, told The New York Times, “He feels like there’s an effort to undermine his election and that collusion allegations are unfounded. He believes passionately that the liberal left and the media are out to destroy him. The way he got here is fighting back and counterpunching …The problem he’s going to face is there’s a difference between running for the office and being president. You’ve got to find that sweet spot between being a fighter and being president.”
But Trump’s answer so far is to be more pugnacious than ever. He told a boisterous rally in Pensacola, Fla. recently that the system is “rigged” against him and he urged his supporters to back him and support politicians who are his allies, including Roy Moore, the embattled GOP candidate for Senate in Alabama. Trump suffered a blow to his political reputation when Moore lost a special election this week after Trump campaigned hard for him by arguing that he needed Moore’s vote to propel his agenda on Capitol Hill.
Actually, Trump’s standing with the public is weak. The Pew Research Center finds that only 32 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, the lowest level in any Pew poll measuring his job approval since he took office in January. Sixty-three percent disapprove. Part of his unpopularity apparently is due to Mueller’s investigation. About 59 percent of Americans say improper contact between senior Trump officials and Russia during the 2016 campaign “definitely or probably occurred,” and only 30 percent say it “definitely or probably did not happen.”
In defense of Trump, fellow Republicans are trying to undermine special counsel Mueller’s credibility as he investigates possible collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia in the Kremlin’s effort to meddle in the U.S. election. Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, a strong Trump backer and informal adviser, has called Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system” and said Mueller’s team is “corrupt, abusively biased and political.” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., is among the GOP members of Congress who have criticized Mueller for alleged bias against Trump. Meadows is the leader of a hard-line conservative group in the House called the Freedom Caucus.
Matthew Miller, a Democrat and former Justice Department spokesman, told The Washington Post, “First, they want to kick up dust about Hillary Clinton so the conservative press has something to talk about that isn’t Trump’s misdeeds. The eventual goal, though, is to delegitimize Mueller in such a way that he can either be fired or can be ignored if he concludes the president broke the law.”
Meanwhile, Trump simmers. “Before taking office,” the Times reported, “Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.” It’s a central tenet of his playbook, when every day brings new opportunities and requirements to crush his adversaries. And it’s the same approach Nixon used until his resignation amid the Watergate scandal in 1974.
View the post here.