In August of 1974, as Richard Nixon’s presidency was receiving the last rites, I recall wandering through Lafayette Park near the White House marveling at the steamy summer silence. After years of raucous antiwar protests, a president was about to be toppled with almost no one marching or waving a picket sign.

What was also striking about the mood 43 years ago is that there was little fear about the continuity or the competence of government. Yes, there were rumors that Nixon was drinking heavily and whispers about his emotional stability. But, for all their flaws, the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and the defense secretary, James Schlesinger, did not spark worries that they would blunder into a nuclear war.

The problem, for me, with all glib comparisons between Nixon and Donald Trump is that they trigger a wave of nostalgia for the 1970s. Nixon never blurted out intelligence secrets when he met with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in July 1974. He could handle foreign policy briefing memos even when they were longer than a single page. And although Nixon had problems with trust, he did not feel compelled to entrust his daughters Tricia and Julie with major policy responsibilities and put his son-in-law David Eisenhower in charge of Middle East peace negotiations.

There is also the awkward reality that, in many ways, Nixon’s first term represented the high-water mark of 20th-century big government liberalism. Not only did he create the Environmental Protection Agency, but he also signed the 1970 Clean Air Act. The food stamp program, developed during the Johnson administration, expanded fivefold during Nixon’s presidency. And Nixon, urged on by his domestic adviser Pat Moynihan, seriously toyed with giving all Americans a guaranteed annual income.

Much of this may have reflected political positioning rather than bred-in-the-bone conviction. After reading a Benjamin Disraeli biography on Moynihan’s recommendation, Nixon said in 1973: “I would say that my view, my approach, is probably that of a Disraeli conservative.” Whatever the label, Nixon was double-jointed enough to embrace law-and-order politics on race while enacting wage-and-price controls.

But what does Trump believe in? His reflection in the mirror. The lies his acolytes tell him about his unappreciated greatness. Maybe Trump the Builder really wanted a vast infrastructure program. But Trump the Negotiator was snookered by his advisers, who convinced him to pursue a standard conservative agenda. As a result, the legislative high point of the Trump years may well be the Oval Office ceremony when one chamber of Congress passed a harsh and ill-constructed health-care bill.

Say what you will about the dark inner recesses of Richard Nixon’s soul. But by Trump standards, the Watergate cover-up was a thing of genius worthy of the talents of Machiavelli or Metternich. Nixon, after all, kept his job for more than two years after the bumbling burglars broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. When the White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dutifully repeated the lies that he was told to peddle to the press, he never had to worry that Nixon would immediately undercut him with a burst of candor in an interview or a TV appearance.

At this point in the Watergate saga, the third-rate burglary was still being covered by two police reporters from the Washington Post. In contrast, in the nine days since Trump fired James Comey, we have gone from contradictory justifications to broad hints of a White House taping system to a president pressing his FBI director to abandon an investigation of a disgraced crony. Trump’s only resort may be the Idiocy Defense – the president did not know that there was anything illegal about asking the FBI director for a favor.

John A Farrell’s new Nixon biography captures a haunting scene on resignation day as the defrocked president delivered to his staff what “may well have been the most raw, acutely painful, and unforgettable speech in American political history”. Nixon invoked his mother, Hannah (“a saint”), lamented his years at tiny Whittier College (“I am not educated, but I do read books”) and spoke emotionally about his life’s rollercoaster trajectory (“Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain”).

Only the foolhardy would dare predict whether Trump leaves the White House involuntarily or at the end of his term of office. But whatever the circumstances of his return to private life (not that he has really left his businesses behind), it is virtually certain that the 45th president will be hard-pressed to utter a coherent thought, let alone find oratory worthy of the occasion. In that, as in so many other things, Richard Nixon has him trumped.

Walter Shapiro is a columnist for Roll Call, a lecturer in political science at Yale and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.





