Will Trump be the next Nixon?
Juicy cases of impeachment
‘Ithink we have a governing crisis,” journalist and author Bob Woodward commented when asked to assess the Donald Trump administration on CNN. Woodward has written books about all of the past nine US presidents and was discussing his latest, Fear: Trump in the White House, which sold more than 1.1-million copies in its first week.
Few are as well equipped to assess the US political landscape as the veteran investigative reporter who in 1972 exposed Watergate with Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein. They uncovered a web of deceit of such magnitude that the suffix “-gate” has become part of the English language. In SA alone we’ve had Muldergate, Nkandlagate and Guptagate, among others.
Watergate was immortalised in All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Even today guests at the Watergate Hotel can fork out $1,300 to spend a night in the room that housed the “masterminds” of the infamous burglary. They can soak up 1970s memorabilia, including period surveillance equipment, and put on dressing gowns embroidered with “Cover Up”.
Woodward and Bernstein’s probe started with the burglary by five men of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC, on June 17 1972. Their trail led right up to the White House, where dirty tricks and political espionage played a central part in forcing Richard Nixon to resign on August 9 1974 — still the only US president to do so.
Now critics are drawing strong parallels between the 45th president of the US and Nixon. The difference being that “Nixon barked his boorish insults and grotesque bigotries into secret tapes; Trump megaphones them via Twitter”, notes The Guardian.
Nixon was the first US president to quit his job, but only because impeachment proceedings against him were certain. (He made sure that his successor, Gerald Ford, would grant him a full pardon before handing back the keys.)
In the wake of Robert Mueller’s report on apparent Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have been debating whether to impeach
Trump. A redacted version of the report was released on April 18 2019 and Mueller, a strait-laced former FBI director, has been subpoenaed to testify before Congress next month about his findings and the possible obstruction of justice by Trump.
The New York Times says the hearings “have the power to potentially reshape the political landscape around his re-election campaign and a possible impeachment inquiry by the Democrat-controlled House”.
Almost 50 years ago, Watergate exposed the dark side of Nixon, who had strongly denied being part of a cover-up. Ironically, one of his closest aides provided the nail in the coffin of Nixon’s political career. Asked a direct question, domestic policy adviser Bob Haldeman, who had been a devoted Nixon political adjutant since the 1950s, admitted under oath that when Nixon became president he had ordered all White House conversations to be taped (what was he thinking?). After fierce legal wrangling, Nixon was forced to hand over the tapes on August 5 1974 and resigned four days later. His impeachment and removal from office was now certain, and this tape would have been the chief piece of evidence against him.
The smoking gun was a recorded conversation on June 23 1972 between Nixon and Haldeman in the Oval Office, an exchange that is regarded as a turning point in the modern history of the US, as Nixon and Haldeman were recorded plotting the obstruction of justice. Nixon and Haldeman agree that calls should be made to the FBI to tell them not to investigate Watergate for fear it would result in the exposure of Nixon’s clandestine domestic intelligence activities.
There were 3,700 hours of Nixon tapes and those that have been transcribed over the years — as well as Haldeman’s meticulous note-taking — reveal a president who was racist, antisemitic and homophobic, and would stop at nothing to become president.
On protests against the Vietnam War, Nixon is heard worrying about “a wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire”.
In a separate conversation with Haldeman, he questions the authenticity of the iconic photograph of a young girl running naked down a street, fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam. He muses: “I’m wondering if that was fixed.”
Discussing Vietnam, he says to secretary of state Henry Kissinger: “The only place you and I disagree … is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”
In an unrelated discussion Nixon warns that, “without getting into any antisemitism”, he is concerned about the influence of a “terrible liberal Jewish clique” in the government. “It erodes our confidence, our strength. They’re just untrustworthy. Look at the justice department. It’s full of Jews.”
In November 1971, after Indira Gandhi visited the White House to discuss tensions between India and Pakistan, Nixon says: “We really slobbered over the old witch.” He also calls her a bitch, to which
Kissinger responds: “The Indians are bastards anyway.”
Speculating about Vietnam had the war ended earlier, Nixon says: “It wouldn’t have been too bad. Sure, the North Vietnamese would have probably slaughtered and castrated 2-million South
Vietnamese Catholics, but nobody would have cared. These little brown people, so far away.”
It was Nixon’s strategy to sabotage peace talks in 1968 which reveal a level of criminality that amounts to treason. Nixon had long been accused of sabotaging peace talks during the Vietnam War, but repeatedly denied this. It was only Haldeman’s meticulous notes detailing conversations with Nixon, released after 2007, that revealed the full extent of his perfidy.
President Lyndon B Johnson had first deployed US troops to Vietnam in 1965. In 1968 Johnson initiated furious, eleventh-hour efforts to end the war. Kremlin leaders had never liked the red-bashing of Nixon and to keep him from the Oval Office they pressed North Vietnam to agree to a ceasefire and concrete talks to end the war. At that point, 30,000 US soldiers had died in the conflict.
Nixon ordered his loyal aide to find ways to sabotage the peace talks so that a frustrated US electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope for peace. Via back-door associates, Nixon sent messages to South Vietnam president Nguyen Van Thieu to subvert peace overtures and hold out for a better peace deal under a Nixon administration.
Nixon always insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative. “My God, I would never do anything to encourage [South Vietnam] not to come to the table,” Nixon tells Johnson in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.
In Fear: Trump in the White House, Woodward
Nixon barked his boorish insults … into secret tapes; Trump megaphones them via Twitter
It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown
paints a picture of a presidential team who feel contempt for Trump or pity for his “teenage logic”. He describes an “administrative coup d’état” during which documents are removed from Trump’s desk or rash orders are stalled.
This leaves their indolent boss free to watch TV, eat hot dogs and swill down Diet Coke.
Gen John Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019, describes Trump as an idiot. “It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
Trump criticises his national security adviser, Lt Gen Herbert Raymond McMaster, for dressing in cheap suits “like a beer salesman”.
The nuclear deal with Iran, Trump declares, is “shitty”. Other problems are categorised as “bullshit” or “horseshit”, while arguments are “ripshit”.
Trump once told a friend with a bad reputation among women: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”
In April this year, The Washington Post reported that it had fact-checked Trump and had found 10,796 things that were misleading or outright false during 869 days of his presidency.
CNN’s editor-at-large, Chris Cillizza, calculated that it was 12 times a day, making him one of the most prolific liars in the history of US politics.
Trump’s most repeated claim — 160 times — was that his border wall was being built (it isn’t).
He has described the process of late-term abortion as follows: “The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
During the campaign in 2015, Trump made the fantastical claim that he had watched “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheering in New Jersey during the 9/11 attacks.
“It was on television. I saw it … There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down,” he said on ABC.
Democrats are hoping that a high-profile televised examination of Mueller’s findings will damn Trump in the court of public opinion.
Although the Trump camp has repeatedly reacted to the report with the mantra “no collusion, no obstruction”, Mueller found that the Trump campaign had plenty of contact with Russian agents, though he explicitly notes how they didn’t look at the question of “collusion” and didn’t find sufficient evidence to charge anyone with “conspiracy”. But he also laid out 10 separate instances where Trump may have obstructed justice.
However Trump’s opponents decide to act, one thing is almost certain. They’ll plot a way forward that’s in their best political interests, and not those of the American public.