I took the bus into downtown Portland on January 21 to observe and take part in the big event. The bus was packed. More than half the riders stood, holding bulky signs, squished together and anxious to exercise their first amendment rights. Upon arrival, a crowd far larger than I had expected to see flooded the waterfront area and the adjacent street, Naito Parkway. Everyone was standing, patiently, and quietly waiting. I took a moment to stand on the median on my tiptoes to get an idea of the real size of the crowd. I stood in a colorful sea of umbrellas and poster boards. There were young people, old people, and families with children; people of all income levels, races, genders, and religions, their respective invisible identities proudly made clear by clothing and the statements on their signs. It was raining and cold, but still we waited. An RV that had found itself parked in the middle of the crowd, graciously sold hot chai from its side window to chilly resistance members. The police had blocked off a route for marchers to follow without being disturbed by traffic. Demonstrators and police shook hands and engaged in friendly conversation. The sound of music and drums echoed through the city streets, giving a beat to chants such as “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” and “we won’t go away, welcome to your first day!” Older people held signs that read “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.”



After the march, I was able to dig up the article about the protest at Richard Nixon’s inauguration written in 1973 by my father, Dan Luzadder, from the microfilm archives of a county library in LaGrange, Indiana. The headline reads “In Search of Peace: 100,000 file by in whispering protest,” published on January 25, 1973 in the LaGrange Standard & News. His words were a foreshadowing portrayal of the experience—timeless in their relevance. My memory of the horde of Portlanders patiently waiting underneath their umbrellas for forward movement to begin was brought to mind when he wrote: “And there, beside the reflecting pool, alongside the Washington Monument, beside the Lincoln Memorial, as the sweet acrid smell of the counter-culture’s opiate drifted across the scene, we stood in the cold, waiting, protesting by our presence, waiting for the March Against Death to begin… waiting also for it to end.”

If I had not known better, I might have thought that he had written about the Women’s March on Washington. The similarity between these respective days in 1973 and 2017 are disquieting and perhaps symptomatic of something much deeper.

As I feared, the protests are not the only parallel between the Nixon experience and the Trump experience so far. More similarities include but are not limited to scandal, the launched attacks on news media, inclinations to test the boundaries of executive power, and instability within the president’s bureaucracy.

Scandals, a word often used in discussion of the Nixon administration, have been another common denominator with Trump’s administration. The Watergate Scandal, a well-known historical event, led to the end of Nixon’s career as president. Trump has not yet faced anything as severe. However, issues of concern that have been brought up include, among other things, his refusal to willingly release his tax records, accusations of sexual assault made against him, and questions of whether his extensive business endeavors constitute a conflict of interest. The ongoing investigations into his ties to Russian government officials have been an issue perhaps most likely to qualify as cause for impeachment, and is also the one that most resembles Watergate.

It should be noted that leaks to the press from unnamed administrative officials were a precursor to Watergate. The Washington Post’s Watergate Timeline observes that during Nixon’s first term as president, a White House entity known as the “plumbers unit,” had been ordered to plug up the leaks. On September 3, 1971, the unit broke into the office of a psychiatrist in an effort to obtain files on Daniel Ellsberg, the previous defense analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. In current events, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has heightened efforts to stop similar leaks from staff members. Word surfaced on February 26 that there had been “an emergency meeting” recently called by Spicer. During the meeting, Spicer confronted communication staff about information that had been leaked to the press. White House staff members’ personal and government-issued phones were made subject to an Orwellian phone-check, overseen by White House lawyers. As stated by Politico, “Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media. It’s not the first time that warnings about leaks have promptly been leaked.”

In both the Nixon and Trump administrations, we have seen a habit of the president and their staff delegitimizing the press and placing blame for problems on the news media. For example, an April 18, 1973 New York Times article about Watergate reported, “The Administration never condoned the Watergate crime, but it denied any involvement by its people, denounced the press for nosing into it or implying that anything was wrong, suggested that the whole thing was a political trick to help George McGovern and embarrass the President—and used all this to prove that irresponsible newspapers should be compelled to disclose their sources of information.”



Sound familiar? The Washington Examiner reported on February 16, 2017, in an article regarding the suspicion that Russia had been hacking to influence the results of the election. The article states, “President Trump on Thursday dismissed the swirling allegations that his administration is too close to Russia, and called that Democratic line of attack against him more ‘fake news’…. ‘Russia is fake news. This is fake news put out by the media,’ Trump concluded. ‘The real news is the fact that people, probably from the Obama administration because they’re there.’” Again, on February 26th, he posted a tweet in which he wrote: “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”