As usual, far too many pro- and anti-Trump pundits are pushing meretricious claims that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report proves either that President Trump is an innocent lamb or a deadly viper. Both takes are dishonest. Nothing from a supposedly respectable journalist, though, is as hideously mendacious as is columnist’s E.J. Dionne’s assertion that Trump is now shown culpable for “behavior that makes Richard Nixon look like George Washington.”
Really?
Dionne here isn’t making the defensible claim that Trump’s overall character is worse than that of former President Richard Nixon — a tortured and twisted soul but with a grand, cause-greater-than-self sense of statesmanship, portrayed appealingly even by MSNBC’s liberal, Kennedy-admiring Chris Matthews. Instead, Dionne is specifically saying that Trump’s conduct in office, as described in the Mueller report, was so horrendously corrupt as to make Nixon’s Watergate sins pale to insignificance in comparison.
Not even the most fervent Never Trumper could make such a claim with a straight face.
Please, people, get some perspective, and get a grip.
Nixon frighteningly misused the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, and the Secret Service to trample the rights of his political enemies, including by illegal, electronic surveillance. Trump did none of those things. Nixon repeatedly withheld material evidence from law enforcement and congressional investigators. Trump, for all his public grousing about the investigation, is reported to have cooperated fully with evidence requests.
Nixon suborned perjury. Trump, despite BuzzFeed’s reporting, did not. Nixon approved payments to silence witnesses before duly constituted investigative bodies. Trump approved no payments related to the Russia probe. (On a non-Russia front, he did approve payments, to buy public silence from disreputable women, but not to hamper a legal proceeding.)
And, apart from specific crimes alleged in the articles of impeachment that a House committee approved against him, Nixon actually used instruments of government to hamper or threaten civil liberties (and a free press) in ways Trump has done only rhetorically, not in actual practice.
The Mueller report makes Trump look vain, ignorant, inept, and astonishingly dishonest. Some of us may think Trump has far fewer redeeming human qualities than Nixon did.
But in terms of actual conduct of the office, Nixon was demonstrably far more corrupt. To say otherwise, much less to the hyperbolic degree Dionne did, is to trample context and history to a worse degree than Nixon trampled the instrumentalities of formal American justice.
