As Donald Trump’s own advisers said last week, that Trump would use Richard Nixon’s famous “law and order” rhetoric during his 1968 campaign as his inspiration for his Republican nomination speech on Thursday, many have begun comparing Trump to the disgraced former president. The parallels with a man who presided over another era in which there was widespread allegations of police brutality and killings of unarmed African-Americans seem compelling.
But if you take a detailed look back at Nixon’s 1968 campaign for president, the analogy runs much deeper than his not-so-coded language attacking racial minorities. As each day passes, Trump’s success looks more and more similar to Nixon’s rise to power.
On Wednesday, Trump campaign surrogate (and widely assumed prospective Attorney General) Chris Christie said the Republican presidential candidate would seek a new law to purge Barack Obama-appointed federal employees. Trump has also promised to “prosecute” Hillary Clinton if he becomes president, and given the disturbing call-and-response of “Lock her up!” during Christie’s convention speech on Tuesday, there’s little doubt he would follow suit. It’s a reminder that Nixon took his own campaign hatchet-man John Mitchell and installed him as Attorney General to do his dirty work.
But long before Nixon ordered Mitchell to wiretap and subpoena journalists who crossed him when he became president, he was threatening to sue the New York Times for libel over an editorial about his vice-presidential running mate Spiro Agnew — just as Trump has threatened multiple news organisations with libel suits in the past several months.
Much like Trump, Nixon and Agnew spent a great deal of their campaign attacking the media, so much so that as former New York Times general counsel James Goodale wrote in his 2011 book on the Nixon administration’s war on journalism: “Many who covered the election for the press said they felt under threat with everything they wrote.”
Just as Trump cajoles his campaign crowds to boo and hiss at the reporters covering him, and hurls insults their way on a nightly basis, Nixon had Agnew tour the country delivering entire speeches ripping into television and news media, once calling famously referring to the mainstream press as “Nattering nabobs of negativism” and “executionary journals ... fit only to line the bottom of bird cages”. Trump’s invective-filled tweets that target any journalist who writes an unflattering story about him bring to mind Agnew regularly calling out individual reporters by name in those same speeches.
One of Nixon’s favourite tricks against his enemies was to set the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on anyone who crossed him. You can hear him on the Nixon tapes, demanding that one person or another who had wronged him have their tax returns audited by the IRS. Trump himself has already hinted at using this tactic as well. After Amazon CEO and billionaire Jeff Bezos criticised Trump in May, Trump immediately accused Bezos of owning the Washington Post to avoid taxes and seemingly hinted at a crackdown to come if he were to become president.
‘Secret’ plan
And then there’s foreign policy. Nixon spent the entire 1968 campaign claiming that he had a “secret” plan to get the US out of Vietnam and that he would bring peace to a country torn up by war — all the while covertly planning on escalating the war behind the scenes. You may remember Trump started out his campaign claiming he had a “secret” plan to defeat Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and has been relentlessly hammering Hillary Clinton for voting for the disastrous Iraq War. Yet, at the same time, he supported that war at the time and has made several comments, suggesting he would engage in war crimes and torture and kill the families of terrorists.
One thing is for sure: A Trump administration will turn into a golden age for leaks. Just look at the debacle over the plagiarism scandal surrounding Melania Trump’s speech on Monday. There are different factions in his campaign constantly trying to backstab each other by anonymously leaking details to the press. Much like under the Nixon, and even in a climate of heightened fear for news organisations, you can bet there will be no shortage of civil service employees willing to tell the press all the crimes happening behind closed doors — especially now that Trump is promising to fire all of them en masse.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Trevor Timm is a Guardian US columnist and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit organisation that supports and defends journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability.
