Donald Trump, you’re no Richard M. Nixon. You might want to be, but you’re not.
Nixon had a raging sense of insecurity, born of a combination of a great potential plus a tragic early life.
This was all exacerbated in adulthood by exposure to and competition with two of the great charmers of all human history. One was Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, born poor but easily able to mix with the high and the mighty. The other was John F. Kennedy, born with just the right combination of charm, brains, and money.
Ignored by Ike, beaten by Kennedy in their great confrontation, broken for life two years later by Jerry Brown’s father Pat (who beat him for governor), Nixon was a dead man walking when he was elected at last in the tragic year of 1968. And he was so afraid from the start that his enemies would find some way to stop him, that he began plotting to stop them the day he won office. That’s how, in the end, he stopped himself.
Nixon’s impeachment was a needed event if ever there was one. The human damage it revealed was so immense that it awed even his enemies.
President Trump’s impeachment, in contrast, was a joke. His foes were aiming to do it even before he took office. That’s why it failed and made them look silly.
Nixon’s plight, after rising from nothing, was tragic. Trump’s, should he fail in November, will be farce.
In 2012, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote of “The Presidents’ Club” as “an alliance the former presidents are conscious of building and the sitting presidents are conscious of building, and the sitting presidents are using, both to promote themselves and advance their agendas … There is no fraternity like it anywhere … For all of the club’s self-serving habits and instincts, when it is functioning at its best it can serve the president, help solve his problems … and even save lives.”
But Trump is one person who will never be in this club, having scorned and abused those coming before him, as well as all those he fought for his place. Even Nixon, the one president who was ever forced to leave office, was never shunned the way Trump is — ordered by the late John McCain and Barbara Bush not to come to their funerals and ignored by all at the George H.W. Bush service at the National Cathedral. No president before or since had ever been shamed like Nixon — forced to leave less than two years after winning reelection in a 49-state landslide.
Upon arriving friendless and scorned back in California in July of 1974, Nixon never stopped trying to ease or to mitigate the shame of his ouster, succeeding at least to the degree that he received a standing ovation from the press corps at one of his last speeches. President Bill Clinton, whose wife had worked in 1974 for the Democrats who were working for Nixon’s impeachment, said that when he heard of Nixon’s passing, he felt the way that he had when his mother had died.
Perhaps by the time Trump goes, he will manage to alter the views of his fellows. But that doesn’t seem likely right now.
