Tag: Richard Nixon

Political legend Pete McCloskey compares ‘psychopath’ Trump to Hitler — and traces the GOP’s demise to Newt Gingrich

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If anyone ought to have perspective about the troubled state of American democracy, it’s Pete McCloskey.

Now 93, McCloskey had more than a front-row seat during the turbulent Vietnam era and the fall of President Richard Nixon. As a renegade Republican congressman, McCloskey called for Nixon’s impeachment over the Vietnam War in 1971, opposed him in the Republican primary in 1972 and was the first to demand his resignation during Watergate.

So McCloskey knows an outlaw president when he sees one. With the benefit of that experience and the wisdom of his years, does he see the need to view the reign of Donald Trump dispassionately as just a case of history repeating itself? Are people overreacting to the turmoil of recent times? Continue reading.

The Lessons of the Nixon Pardon

On the morning of January 6th, news networks confirmed that the Democrats had captured Georgia’s Senate seats, insuring that the Party will hold a majority in both houses of Congress once Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are inaugurated, next week, and giving the new Administration greater ability to carry out its agenda. That afternoon, a mob incited by President Trump ransacked the Capitol; in response, House leaders prepared to impeach the President for a second time, adopting a single article of incitement of insurrection. Ten Republicans joined the Democrats in voting for impeachment, among them Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican and the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Some Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have indicated that they would consider voting for removal. However, McConnell, who will remain Majority Leader until the Georgia Democrats are seated, likely next week, has said that he will not begin the Senate impeachment trial until January 19th, the day before the Inauguration. Meanwhile, law-enforcement agencies have warned about the threat of further terrorist violence in Washington, D.C. before and on Inauguration Day.

The chaos and criminality of January 6th thus threaten to cast a shadow over Biden’s agenda, as well as to take up precious time on the congressional calendar. The last President to confront such problems concerning the culpability of a predecessor was Gerald Ford, who, shortly after taking office, in 1974, pardoned Richard Nixon for any and all crimes committed during Nixon’s Presidency. To talk about the wide-ranging effects of the pardon, I spoke by phone with the historian Rick Perlstein, who is the author of a series of books that chart the rise of modern conservatism. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed Ford’s motives for pardoning Nixon, whether liberals should care about the health of the G.O.P., and why the Trump siege may have been the culmination of the Goldwater revolution.

Your work presents Ford taking office as this incredible unifying moment, or what people believed to be a unifying moment, which was then quickly shattered by the pardon. What lessons does it hold for today? Continue reading.

Like Nixon, Trump Evades Taxes — But The Striking Similarities Only Begin There

Donald Trump’s tax returns are the talk of the town, and news outlets and the Twittersphere are humming with comparisons to another White House occupant plagued by tax scandals: Richard Nixon.

“‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,’ Nixon said,” tweetedWashington Post columnist Catherine Rampell on Monday. “The comment wasn’t about Watergate, but rather funny business in his tax returns.”

A New York Times exposé published Sunday revealed that Trump’s billionaire persona is largely a myth. Instead, Trump’s financial records show massive debt, bumbling business dealings, and a penchant for avoiding taxes. Continue reading.

Trump and Nixon were pen pals in the ‘80s. Here are their letters.

The letters between once and future presidents show the two men engaged in something of an exercise in mutual affirmation. 

They were two men in Manhattan who craved the same thing: validation. One was a brash, young real estate developer looking to put his stamp on New York, the other a disgraced elder statesman bent on repairing his reputation.

That’s how a thirty-something Donald Trump and a seventy-ish Richard Nixon struck up a decade-long, fulsome correspondence in the 1980s that meandered from football and real estate to Vietnam and media strategy.

The letters between once and future presidents, revealed for the first time in an exhibit that opens Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, show the two men engaged in something of an exercise in mutual affirmation. The museum shared the letters exclusively with The Associated Press ahead of the exhibit’s opening. Continue reading.

Democrats keep having to clean up Republican messes. When is our turn to advance America?

A President Biden would face extraordinary damage and repair jobs at home and abroad. Democrats must hammer this home to voters and stop the cycle.

Should former Vice President Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump in the November election, his victory will cement a pattern that influential Democratic messengers would be wise to exploit savagely in order to change.

Many Americans have not yet grasped that every time they have given Republicans the keys to the White House over the past half-century, they turn to Democrats to extinguish the fire. This arrangement hampers party priorities each time Democrats come to power because their first orders of business are to clean up the ashes. Once the country is sturdy enough, the electorate returns to Republicans to get a little extra walking around cash in the form of marginal tax cuts, and Democratic policy goes back underground.

This pattern began when Richard Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, presided over a three-year recession that darkened the outlook for Ford before the 1976 campaign launched in earnest. Democrat Jimmy Carter glided into office on a message of reform, after the country felt betrayed by Watergate and Nixon’s corrupt inner circle, and of recovery from poor GOP stewardship of the economy. Continue reading.

Nixon signed this key environmental law. Trump plans to change it to speed up pipelines, highway projects and more.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump plans this week to overhaul a federal law that poor and minority communities around the country have used for generations to delay or stop projects that threaten to pollute their neighborhoods — a law he says needlessly blocks good jobs, industry and public works.

The president’s plan to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock environmental law signed with much fanfare by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, would make it easier to build highways, pipelines, chemical plants and other projects that pose environmental risks.

If the final version mirrors a proposal from January, it would force agencies to complete even the most exhaustive environmental reviews within two years and restrict the extent to which they could consider a project’s full impact on the climate. Continue reading.

‘Make America grim again’: Americans haven’t been this sad overall since Nixon

AlterNet logoThree months into the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed more than 116,000 Americans, people across the United States are reporting lower levels of happiness than at any point since the 1970s—nearly 50 years ago.

According to the Covid Response Tracking Survey, conducted late last month by NORC at the University of Chicago, just 14% of Americans report that they are “very happy.”

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Make America grim again https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-havent-been-this-unhappy-in-50-years-poll-2020-06-16?reflink=mw_share_twitter …

Americans haven’t been this unhappy in 50 years: poll

The poll, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found that just 14% of American adults say they’re very happy, down from 31% who said the same in…

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The researchers compared their findings to those of the General Social Survey, taken every other year since 1972, and found that at least 29% of respondents to that poll have always reported feeling “very happy” with their lives. Continue reading.

Trump bets his presidency on a ‘silent majority’

With his law-and-order, tough-on-protesters rhetoric, Donald Trump is courting a suburban vote that might no longer exist.

The lines of demarcation between the nation’s cities and their suburbs have faded in the decades since Richard M. Nixon courted the “Silent Majority” that elected him to the White House.

With his law-and-order, tough-on-protesters rhetoric, Donald Trump is betting his presidency it still exists.

The suburbs — not the red, but sparsely populated rural areas of the country most often associated with Trump — are where Trump found the majority of his support in 2016. Yet it was in the suburbs that Democrats built their House majority two years ago in a dramatic midterm repudiation of the Republican president. Continue reading.

Trump Says He ‘Learned From Nixon’ — But Did He?

Donald Trump on Friday morning defended his behavior and comments surrounding the Russi investigation, saying he “learned a lot from Richard Nixon” about how to handle probes into his administration.

“I learned a lot. I study history,” Trump said in an interview with Fox & Friends — referring to what he learned from Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Nixon fired Department of Justice officials looking into his handling of the Watergate scandal.

“And the firing of everybody — I should’ve in one way, but I’m glad I didn’t because look at the way it turned out. They’re all a bunch of crooks and they got caught.” Continue reading.

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers: Nixon ‘never admitted his crimes — Trump announced his in public’

AlterNet logoFollowing a week of public impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee, renowned public broadcast journalist Bill Moyers on Friday expressed alarm at President Donald Trump’s attacks on the witnesses who came forward to inform the public about the president’s misconduct in office—and the complicity of top administration officials.

“For President Trump to vigorously denigrate them, to malign them, with [Trump’s personal attorney Rudy] Giuliani leading a smear campaign against these fine public servants, is disgusting, it’s repulsive, it’s abominable,” Moyers said in an interview with MSNBC‘s Chris Hayes late Friday.

As Common Dreams reported, Trump tweeted attacks on former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as she testified last Friday, sparking accusations of “witness intimidation in real time.”

View the complete November 24 article by Jake Johnson from Common Dreams on the AlterNet website here.