From an opinion piece by Paul Krugman for The New York Times:
Donald Trump isn’t Richard Nixon — he’s much, much worse. And America 2020 isn’t America 1970: We’re a better nation in many ways, but our democracy is far more fragile thanks to the utter corruption of the Republican Party. […] The Trump-Nixon comparisons are obvious. Like Nixon, Trump has exploited white backlash for political gain. Like Nixon, Trump evidently believes that laws apply only to the little people.
These guys have a few interesting parallels, including their utilization of concepts and dog whistles like the “silent majority” and “law and order”, but their divergences are also stark and worthy of recognition.
Nixon, however, doesn’t seem to have been a coward. Amid mass demonstrations, he didn’t cower in the MAGAbunker, venturing out only after his minions had gassed peaceful protesters and driven them out of Lafayette Park. Instead, he went out to talk to protesters at the Lincoln Memorial. His behavior was a bit weird, but it wasn’t craven.
And while his political strategy was cynical and ruthless, Nixon was a smart, hard-working man who took the job of being president seriously.
His policy legacy was surprisingly positive — in particular, he did more than any other president, before or since, to protect the environment. Before Watergate took him down he was working on a plan to expand health insurance coverage that in many ways anticipated Obamacare.
A Republican who didn’t burn tires and thought people should have access to healthcare? Must’ve been a communist plant.
So Trump is no Nixon. And the country he’s trying to dominate — his favorite word — is very different, too. […]
A majority of Americans are willing to acknowledge that racism is real and see it as a problem, which represents huge moral progress. Nixon’s “silent majority” is now a noisy minority.
At the time, Nixon’s silent majority was basically code for “white people who all agree that they’re better than everyone else”. Now, Trump’s silent majority is actually a noisy minority of white people who pretend that they don’t think they’re better than everyone else, but make arguments in bad faith that prop up systemic racism and facilitate the preservation of the status quo that makes them feel comfortable because it affords them a disproportionate amount of social power.
But it’s a very dangerous minority. While we are, as I said, in many ways a better nation than we were, we’re also a nation in which the rule of law and democratic values are very much under siege.
At this point it’s alarmingly easy to see how the United States could follow the path already taken by Hungary, becoming a democracy on paper but an authoritarian one-party state in practice. And I’m not talking about the distant future: It could happen this year, if Trump wins re-election — or even, potentially, if he loses but refuses to accept the results.
Unfortunately, the way the electoral college is designed, it allows for the ballots of such a minority to have disproportional sway.
And the reason democracy is threatened in a way it never was under Nixon is not simply that Trump is a worse human being than Nixon ever was; it is the fact that he has so many enablers.
Trump’s authoritarian instincts, his admiration for and envy of foreign strongmen, his desire to militarize law enforcement have long been obvious.
To paraphrase the hosts of a political (though admittedly left-biased) podcast I enjoy, countries don’t typically enthusiastically adopt fascism on principle, it’s something they stumble into. The road to authoritarianism is a slippery slope, and I’m afraid that Lady Liberty has one foot on that slope and the other on a skateboard.
These things wouldn’t matter so much, however, if the Republican Party were still the institution it was in the 1970s — a big tent with room for a variety of views, represented in the Senate by many people with real principles. These were people willing to remove a president, even if he was a Republican, when he betrayed his oath of office.
The modern G.O.P., however, is nothing like that. Many of its leading figures — people like Senator Tom Cotton — are every bit as authoritarian and anti-democratic as Trump himself.
The rest, with hardly any exceptions, are loyal apparatchiks, intimidated into obedience by an angry base. This base gets its information from Fox and Facebook and basically lives in an alternate reality, in which protesters demonstrating peacefully against police brutality are actually a radical horde that will begin a violent insurrection any minute now.
The point is that today’s Republican Party wouldn’t object to a Trumpian power grab, even if it amounted to a military coup. On the contrary, the party would cheer it on.
Nixon isn’t the only unsavory politician with whom Trump has some unfortunate similarities.
UPDATED: 7/15/20, 23:43
