During the 1980s, Donald Trump and Richard Nixon were friendly acquaintances and mutual admirers.
In 1982, Trump wrote Nixon a fan letter saying, “I think you are one of the country’s great men, and it was an honor to spend an evening with you.” Later, Trump wrote, “One of my great ambitions is to have the Nixons as residents in Trump Tower.”
Nixon was similarly effusive. In 1987, he wrote to Trump after his wife, Pat, saw him on the Phil Donahue Show. In his missive, Nixon described how Pat effused over his appearance on the program, adding, “As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!”
John Dean, Nixon’s former White House legal counsel who was indicted in the Watergate scandal, describes the content of those many letters as revealing “the waves of each other’s personalities,” concluding: “These are two authoritarian personalities who would have a natural affinity for each other.”
Nixon and Trump shared many similarities. Both saw the press as the enemy and sought to discredit mainstream media outlets.
The late political scientist James David Barber categorized Nixon as an active-negative president — a terminology for those chief executives who expend vast amounts of energy to compensate for their own shortcomings while aggressively seeking power and keeping it once acquired.
Undoubtedly, Barber would have classified Trump as an active-negative president, with Dean calling Trump “an even stronger version of this category.” Warning: Active-negative presidents are the most dangerous.
So, with that in mind, how could Trump be actively engaged in undermining Nixon’s presidency?
The answer comes from Nixon himself. In 1983, Nixon gave an extended interview to his former White House special assistant Frank Gannon. In that interview, Nixon imagined himself presenting his case to a jury of historians. He began with the negative side, making a passing reference to the Watergate scandal and becoming the first president to resign the office.
But then he offered a more positive view, noting that he “opened relations with China after 25 years of no communication,” “ended a war in Vietnam,” “ended the draft,” “negotiated the first arms control agreement with the Soviet Union,” “restored balance to the Supreme Court” and “initiated programs in the field of the environment and hunger and cancer and drugs that are very sound building blocks for the future.”
Nixon told Gannon that at the end of his life he hoped that on the scales of history he would be awarded with one more victory than defeat.
From Nixon’s perspective, those victories would include a breakthrough on cancer, carrying out his environmental initiatives “in a responsible way,” making sure relations with China didn’t fall apart, and building on the relationship he established with the former Soviet Union.
He concluded, “I consider it a victory if we move the world toward peace and justice and progress. That’s what I live my life for, that’s what I think we contributed toward, and that’s why in the balance of my life that I come out with one more victory than defeat.”
Today historians are not persuaded, placing Nixon near the bottom of their presidential rankings. Still, Nixon’s record deserves a more thorough examination, especially considering Trump’s actions during his first six months in office.
In 1970, Nixon signed the Clean Air Act saying, “I think that 1970 will be known as the year of the beginning, in which we really began to move on the problems of clean air and clean water and open spaces for the future generations of America.”
That same year, he created the Environmental Protection Agency. Two years later, Nixon signed the Clean Water Act, putting him on a par with another environmentally-minded Republican, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1971, Nixon launched a $100 million campaign to find a cure for cancer.
Today, Trump is busily undoing each of these efforts. Science budgets are being slashed, research and grant projects are being terminated and government scientists are getting fired.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is cutting his agency’s budget, undermining the safety of proven vaccines to combat disease, leading to measles outbreaks and undermining the ability of the government to combat the next pandemic.
Between February and June of this year, the National Institutes of Health has terminated 1,800 grants that negatively impact cancer research and studies of other important diseases.
Trump has reversed Nixon’s environmental initiatives and the work undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency that Nixon created. This is clear from Trump’s mass layoffs and cancellation of vital programs falling under that agency’s aegis.
And when it comes to foreign policy, Trump voided the arms control agreements signed by Nixon and subsequent presidents. Trump has also pushed our relations with China to a new low with his tariff wars, undermining Nixon’s objective that our relationship with China would “not fall apart.”
Trump has also damaged our alliances and weakened NATO. Increasingly, his America First approach to the world translates into America alone.
At this juncture, Trump’s remaking of the government has undermined the case Nixon imagined himself making to future historians. Returning to the status quo prior to Trump’s inauguration and keeping Nixon’s self-proclaimed achievements in place seems like a distant reality.
Today, despite their many shared characteristics, and notwithstanding their mutual admiration, Trump is denying Nixon that one last victory he so longed sought.
John Kenneth White is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America. His latest book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”
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