James Robenalt is a presidential historian. He is the author of January 1973, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever, and a contributor to the upcoming The Presidents and the Constitution, A Living History (due out in May). He lives in Cleveland, the site of the Republican National Convention.

Donald Trump is now openly inciting violence at his rallies. In Kansas City, he mouthed the words, “I’ll beat the crap out of you,” when describing what he would have done to a protester who charged him in Dayton, Ohio, earlier in the day. “Boom, boom, boom,” he said, mimicking a schoolyard beat down with his fists.

“Part of the problem is … nobody wants to hurt each other anymore,” he yelled at protesters in St. Louis who were being physically ejected from his event. “The audience hit back,” he said earlier at a news conference in Florida, “that’s what we need a little bit more of.”


As Trump grandstanded, agitating the crowd, encouraging and condoning physical attacks against protesters, his supporters cheered.

It was an alarming development in this bizarre and unpredictable campaign for the presidency. Presidential words carry real, sometimes severe consequences, and to hear a candidate for the office so glibly stirring up violence is nothing short of startling.

One begins to wonder if a wide swath of American voters have no historical memory at all. If people today think that Trump’s agitation is appropriate, or as he puts it, basically harmless, then they were not alive during the Nixon administration in 1970, when exactly this sort of reckless political hate-mongering held America in its awful grip—and even took a deadly turn.

Since I recently wrote a book about Richard Nixon and in the process listened to hundreds of hours of his White House tapes, I can’t help but draw comparisons between Nixon and Trump. Nixon was a savvy political operator; so is Trump. Nixon appealed to the angry and alienated; so does Trump. And Nixon played to the fear of displacement in the social order; so does Trump. And then, of course, there’s their shared tendency to say things in anger or spite, without really thinking of the results, or worse, knowing the consequences, but still plowing forward.

In a highly charged political atmosphere—whether in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when America was divided over Vietnam, civil rights and how to address urban crime, or today, when we’re agitated over terrorism, economic inequality and unprecedented congressional gridlock—rhetoric that inflames and exposes long-simmering racial prejudices and hatreds serves to only add an element of unacceptable danger to our already volatile political process. It can happen in 2016—just like it happened in 1970.

On April 30, 1970, Nixon surprised the nation (and many in his Cabinet) with an announcement that he was invading Cambodia.

All hell broke loose across the nation. Americans, especially college students who were subject to the draft, thought the war had been winding down. Now it was escalating. Protests racked the country, nowhere more than on college campuses.

The day after the announcement of the invasion (“incursion” if you supported Nixon), Nixon visited the Pentagon and as he was leaving he stopped to speak extemporaneously to Pentagon workers. In Trump-like fashion, Nixon callously referred to college protesters as “bums.” His remarks were caught by the media and widely printed in newspapers.

This was an incitement.

That weekend, students at Kent State University in Ohio burned down the ROTC building on their campus. Two days later, on Monday, May 4, National Guard troops sent in to restore order wheeled in unison on a hill and opened fire on unarmed students, killing four and seriously wounding many others.

If you have ever walked the grounds at Kent State and stood where the troops stood and looked out for the memorials to the dead students in a parking lot several football fields away, you instantly realize these young men in the National Guard could hardly have made out the faces of the young people they were shooting and killing.

Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, kept an amazing diary of happenings while he was in the White House. As events spiraled out of control following the shootings, with college campuses shutting down and students descending on Washington by the tens of thousands, Haldeman recorded that he and Nixon realized that the president’s thoughtless and provocative language played a role in the Kent State tragedy and the subsequent campus unrest.

On May 6, two days after the shootings, Haldeman wrote: “As day went on, concern from outside about campus crisis built rapidly. All of us had lots of calls and memos, etc. P came to grips with it this afternoon. Obviously realizes, but won’t openly admit, his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.”

One of the stricken fathers of a young woman killed at Kent State could only mutter to the media: “My daughter was not a bum.”

Words matter. Before we end up with another version of Kent State—perhaps at a Trump rally, at a university or at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July—Trump needs to get ahold of himself and condemn violence at his rallies. He needs to stop the agitation. No one wants to revisit a time when we had to bury our own children simply because they protested in favor of peace.