Nixon, Trump similar, Watergate figure says
INTERVIEW /
Richard Nixon and Donald Trump check many of the same boxes, John Dean says.
And, he suggests, Trump is shaping up to be a worse president than the only person ever to resign the office.
Despite the scandals that came to dominate his administration, Nixon was more experienced and better prepared than the “dishonest” and “racist” Trump, says the then-White House counsel, whose testimony helped topple Nixon in 1974 amid the Watergate cover-up.
Behind closed doors, the introverted Nixon was similar to Trump — an extrovert who is deeply rooted in who he already is and will not change, Dean said.
“To me, the most conspicuous similarity is the fact that Nixon privately was an authoritarian, while, publicly, Trump is an authoritarian,” the 78-yearold Ohio native said in an interview with The Dispatch on Thursday.
The lawyer-turnedinvestment banker and author spoke in Columbus before a seminar staged by the Ohio State Bar Association, largely to a group of lawyers.
Dean, who was born in Akron and lived in Marion until his early teens, served a four-month prison sentence for his involvement in the Watergate cover-up. he called Republicans Trump and Nixon “social dominators” who believe only they can solve the nation’s problems.
Both Nixon and Trump shared a desire for personal power while being intimidating, bullying, vengeful, prejudiced, immoral and manipulative, Dean said. “They cheat to win, tell others what they want to hear and take advantage of suckers,” he said. “They create false images of themselves.”
“There are unique parallels of both relying on the silent majority, both taking a fractured voting public and figuring out how to exploit it,” Dean said.
More than four decades apart, Nixon and Trump tapped into a base of supporters who “want to be told how the country should be led. They don’t want to think through the solutions themselves. They want daddy to tell them and protect them and make sure everything is good and great,” Dean said.
In the wake of Trump talking of “very fine people” on “both sides” of the confrontation between counter-protesters and neoNazis, white supremacists and KKK members in Charlottesville, Virginia, Dean said,” I am not surprised. It was almost predictable.
“You look at this man, and the office has not tempered him. It’s all baked in already. He’s 71 years of age and he is not going to change, he is not going to pivot ... He is not taking a moral leadership position and he is getting hammered for it — and he’s sensitive to it.”
Nixon had congressional experience, eight years as vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower and a morerefined world view when he became president, but Trump has none, Dean said.
“Trump has no preparation at all. It shows. He doesn’t even have a good newspaper knowledge of how Washington works, so it’s going to continue to be thrilling.”
Dean, by the way, was inspired by his years in Marion to write a biography about the city’s most famous son, President Warren G. Harding, who he considers to be “underrated” for his accomplishments, despite an assortment of scandals, between 1921 and 1923, when he died in office.