Trump is No Nixon

There is no greater indicator of just how low President Donald Trump has sunk than to realize that he has, somehow, incredibly, made former President Richard Nixon seem like an admirable leader by comparison.   How did it come to this?

I refer, of course, to President Trump's dreadful handling of the civil unrest gripping American cities.  With the death of George Floyd at the hand of what were, at a minimum, callously stupid police officers, protests have erupted across the nation, and rightly so.  Unfortunately for the president, these protests are finding rich soil in the record unemployment rate the nation is experiencing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.  People, without jobs, without schools, and even without basic entertainment venues such as movie theaters, have more than ample free time to take to the streets and engage in some civil activism, hence the massive crowds.  Of course, as with any mass movement, opportunists - thugs, anarchists, professional troublemakers - have attempted to capitalize on the disorder, resulting in those unfortunate accounts of looting, general hooliganism, and sadly, even assaults upon the police themselves.  

In this dangerously unstable situation that America is now facing, there is an urgent need for a steady hand at the tiller of government.  Sadly, this is not what we now have.  

In his typically brutish manner, President Trump has sought not to calm the situation but rather inflame it.  This was on dreadful display when, after giving a public address in which he claimed to be "an ally of all peaceful protesters," the president had, astoundingly, given the order to have riot and military police use tear gas and physical force to clear out peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square.  Why?  So Trump could have a photo opportunity in front of historic St. John's Church.  Awkwardly holding up a bible, Trump mugged for the camera and mumbled a few empty words not worthy of the effort to transcribe here.  He never once tried to engage with the crowd of protesters in any fashion.  All in all, it was a performance worthy not of an American president but a South American dictator or Iranian mullah.  

When I saw this embarrassing charade, I was immediately reminded of another president who, when confronted with a protest near the White House, sought out those protesters in an attempt to gain an understanding of what motivated them and, just perhaps, mend some fences.  I am referring to President Richard Nixon's late-night visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Nixon midnight ride was prompted by an especially violent wave of protests in the wake of Nixon's April 30th televised address to the nation in which he justified America's expansion of the Vietnam War into neighboring Cambodia.  Reenergized by this change in foreign policy, protesters took to the streets and swarmed college campuses.  On May 4th, this surge of anti-war energy would lead to tragedy when the governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, called out the National Guard and deployed them to Kent State.   With orders to fix bayonets and disperse the protesters, the Ohio Guardsmen advanced under a cloud of tear gas.  For reasons that are still not clear, these Guardsmen would fire live ammunition into the crowd, some 60-odd shots, killing four students and wounding nine.

This tragedy, which would become known as the "Kent State Massacre," sent shockwaves around the country and would reach all the way into the White House.  Upon learning of the shootings, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman described the mood of the president as "very disturbed" because Nixon feared that it might have been his decision to expand the war that set the stage for the massacre.  Throughout the day, Nixon requested updated briefings on the incident and hoped to find evidence that the Guardsmen were merely defending themselves, evidence that never was found.

The shooting at Kent State only served to further inflame the anti-war protesters, swelling their ranks like never before.  Protests in Washington DC became so large that the White House soon found itself ringed with buses as a defensive bulwark, one patrolled by units from the 82nd Airborn Division, no less.  Despite Nixon's hope that his scholarly TV briefing on the rationale for expanding the war would serve to defuse the worst aspects of any anti-war blowback, the White House quickly came under siege by irate protestors.

It was during the height of this potentially explosive situation that President Richard Nixon did what is perhaps one of the gutsiest moves by an American president: he left his sleepless bed and, with his trusty valet Manolo Sanchez in tow, visited the protestors at the Lincoln Memorial!  Nixon later recalled, "I said, ‘Get your clothes on, and we will go down to the Lincoln Memorial.  Well, I got dressed, and at approximately 4:35, we left the White House and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. I have never seen the Secret Service quite so petrified with apprehension.”  

What actually transpired as the President of the United States mixed with a large crowd of anti-war activists that morning is somewhat unclear.  President Nixon would recall he expressed regret that the protestors didn't understand his intentions in expanding the war into Cambodia:

“...I had tried to explain in the press conference that my goals in Vietnam were the same as theirs—to stop the killing, to end the war, to bring peace…There seemed to be no—they did not respond. I hoped that their hatred of the war, which I could well understand, would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country, and everything that it stood for. I said, ‘I know you, that probably most of you think I’m an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.’ ”

The protestors would have a slightly different recollection, one in which Nixon, getting little favorable reaction to his foreign policy pleas, quickly switched gears to polite conversation concerning the usual banalities of breezy chit-chat, such as where the protestors came from, their hobbies, and so on. As with most things, I suspect the truth is found in a mix of the two accounts.  Be that as it may, one thing cannot be denied: it was one of the most courageous acts of spontaneous outreach ever attempted by a president.

Contrast that wonderful performance with what we have seen this past week from the current occupant of the White House.  Nixon was moved by the tragedy of Kent State; Trump seems largely unmoved by George Floyd's death.  Nixon worried that his foreign policy rhetoric might have caused a tragedy; Trump doubles-down on his rhetoric so as to better pit his base against his political foes.  Lastly, Nixon made an unannounced trip, in the wee hours of the morning no less, to visit with those who held a vastly different worldview so as to gain understanding and find mutual ground; Trump, after a scripted Rose Garden presser, unleashed the military to "dominate" protestors so that he can pose victorious in front of an alerted media.  What a contrast.

I was not at all surprised when, ever the men with most honor, some of this nation's senior military leadership was outraged by Trump's actions, as well as his threat to invoke the "Insurrection Act" and use federal troops to oppose the protestors. Even his former Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, felt compelled to emerge from retirement to denounce his former commander-in-chief.  As Mattis stated in his open letter, 

"Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part.

...

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.  We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. "

Dear reader, you need to understand something about me.  Until 2016, I was a reliable Republican voter.  But when Donald Trump hijacked the GOP and won the nomination by putting together a coalition of disaffected midwest voters (many former Democrats or first-time voters) and "alt-right" extremists, I knew that this was a bridge I could not cross.  While I may have disagreed with past Republican nominees, I nonetheless could assuage my distaste by recognizing that such men, at least, were decent people with a modicum of qualifications to hold high office.  Donald Trump was the first nominee I had seen in my lifetime that violated every standard I had, moral as well as intellectual.  Sadly, four years later, my internal warnings have proven correct.  Offering little more than false bravado and jingoistic platitudes, Donald Trump has proven to be the leadership disaster it was clear he always was. 

When "Tricky Dicky" Nixon shines by comparison to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you know something is very wrong with the American presidency.

[This essay was made better by  Howard Means' article, "The Story of the Really Weird Night Richard Nixon Hung Out With Hippies at the Lincoln Memorial."