With Trump’s inner circle crumbling, its’s like déjà vu to the Nixon era
The guilty plea from Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, is conspicuous evidence of corruption that is dangerously linked to the president. Cohen claimed to the courts that he violated consistent campaign finance laws “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office”. This surely is punitive to a criminal Trump who behaves more like a mobster than an elected candidate.
The guilty charge of Cohen also coincides with the indictments of Trump campaign staffers; Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos and former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn. They have all been charged with violating campaign laws and hiding their close connections with Russian and Ukrainian figures. All were influential on the Trump campaign trail and administration. Whether the president remained aware of their misdemeanours remains to be seen.
The mobster mentality taken by Trump is uncanny to the one used by former corrupt president, Richard Nixon. The notorious Watergate scandal of the 1970’s, led by Nixon, saw him forced to resign from the White House before an almost certain impeachment was imposed. Top aides close to Nixon were also charged with ‘perjury’ and ‘obstruction of justice’ — infamously known collectively as the “Watergate Seven”. They came before Nixon’s dismal ending; therefore déjà vu is certainly clear as this saga continues. Whether Trump suffers the same fate is blurred but is very possible. The behaviours he has expressed so far mirror the ones of a paranoid Nixon. His close circle is being exposed and only time will tell if these investigations will reach the Oval Office.
In general, the first eighteen months of the Trump administration are almost a copy of the Nixon presidency. Both attacked the press and refused entry to some news platforms that categorically attacked them. Nixon barred the Washington Post from attending his daughter’s wedding. Meanwhile, Trump recently banned a cable news reporter from a Rose Garden event. The endemic assaults on the press are volatile and violent, but the infantile behaviour towards the media clearly shows a pathetic approach to handling critics.
Furthermore, the Nixon/Trump election messages are highly familiar and resonated throughout a forgotten America. They vowed to bring law and order to what they perceived as a lawless America. The anti-war protests and integration movements that perpetuated through the 1960’s was brought to an almighty end when a tough, authoritative Nixon promised change. The same happened with Trump. In 2016, he ran on an anti-immigration and far-right platform that promised to “Make America Great Again”. When America was great is disputed amongst the electorate, but bringing civility to what they deemed as perilous times helped garner votes in their favour.
It is seriously laughable that two presidents wanted to be taken seriously as law and order justice warriors, but instead are the most lawless and criminalised presidents the world has seen. Their flippant and barbaric acts; threatening to fire the special prosecutors who are investigating them, meddling into complex foreign issues to deflect and throwing their own close allies under the bus are sincere signs of unravelling guilt.
If Nixon was alive today to witness this, who knows what his opinion may be. His time in retirement saw him attempt to muster up an image of an elderly statesmanlike figurehead by writing books and taking foreign trips. If Trump follows the same route to impeachment, I cannot see him acting in the same manner. It is more likely he will turn against his own base rather than redeem himself. Maybe this will be the only difference between the two. But right now, it is frightening how similar they really are.
